TEHRAN, July 16 (RIA Novosti) - Relief workers at the crash site of an airliner in Iran said on Thursday the force of the impact and subsequent fire meant there was no way to identify the victims, the Fars news agency reported.
"There is not a single piece which can be identified. There is not a single finger of anybody left," an emergency worker at the site said, adding that all he found were "pieces of flesh and bone."
Officials believe identifying the victims will be a lengthy process. The remains have been sent to a coroner's office in Tehran, said Mohammad Ali Ahani, a local rescue team leader.
The Russian-made Tupolev plane was en route from Tehran to the Armenian capital, Yerevan, on Wednesday when it crashed soon after takeoff on a farm in the northern Iranian Qazvin province.
The crash, believed to have been caused by a fire in one of the engines, led to an explosion and the pieces of the aircraft were scattered over an area of 200 square meters. No one on the ground was injured.
Rescuers have recovered two of three flight data recorders from the plane, although they were severely damaged in the crash and ensuing blaze.
"If efforts to retrieve data from the boxes fail, they will be sent back to the country that produced them so that they can be repaired in order to find the reason behind the crash," Press TV quoted an Iranian transport ministry official, Ahmad Majidi, as saying.
A spokesman for Armenia's civil aviation department said the Tu-154M plane had undergone full technical maintenance a month ago and was authorized to operate flights up to 2010.
Tupolev Tu-154 planes, the backbone of Russia and the Soviet Union's air transport system, are considered safe and are rarely involved in technical failures.
Almost all those killed in the crash were Iranian citizens. Thirty-six were ethnic Armenians, but only five of them were holders of Armenian passports, according to the latest reports.
There were four children on the plane, one of them an Armenian national.
The families of the victims will receive an insurance of between 32,000 euros and 42,000 euros, the chief of Armenia's civil aviation department chief, Artyom Movsisyan, said.
Thursday was declared a nationwide day of mourning in Armenia.
