A passenger aircraft has crashed in northwestern Iran, killing all 168 people on board.
The Caspian Airlines Tupolev crashed near a village outside the city of Qazvin shortly after takeoff from Tehran's international Imam Khomeini airport.
The plane was en route to Yerevan in Armenia carrying 153 passengers and 15 crew members.
Witnesses said the aircraft exploded after it dropped of out of the sky, and television images showed a vast crater at the disaster site littered with debris of plane parts, shoes and clothes.
Iran's ISNA news agency also quoted a local police officer as saying that some witnesses had reported that the plane was on fire in mid-air.
Iran has been under years of international sanctions which prevent it from purchasing US-made Boeing or European Airbus aircraft.
The country has suffered a number of aviation disasters over the past decade but today's crash is the worst for many years.
'The plane took off from the Imam Khomeini airport at 11:33am (8.03am Irish) and 16 minutes later it disappeared off the radar and crashed,' said civil aviation spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh.
'We can not confirm anything more before we receive additional information from the team that we despatched at the crash site.'
Iran airport authority managing director Ahmad Momeni said the last conversation between the pilot and the ground was 'normal and did not indicate any technical glitch.'
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered the transport ministry to launch a probe into the disaster.
