Fire at the TU -154 wreck area has been extinguished. Rescuers try to retrieve burnt bodies from the Caspian Airline jet which heading from Tehran to Yerevan crashed taking lives of 169 people, Iranian ISNA news agency reported.

Press TV footage showed a massive crater in a field, with smoldering debris and parts of bodies over a wide area. Iranian media cite different witnesses, some of them say: “the plane disappeared from the sky and then exploded on impact,” the other — “the jet was set on fire in the air.”

The Tupolev plane went down near Jannat-abad village near Qazvin at 11:33 am local time on Wednesday after it took off from the Iranian capital Tehran to fly to Yerevan in Armenia. All of 153 passengers and the crew of 15 on board are confirmed dead.