Searchers have found the wreck of an Iranian military plane which crashed in the southeast of the country with 302 people aboard, the official news agency IRNA has reported.
The crash, which also had one of the highest death tolls in world aviation history, occurred on Wednesday evening when a Russian-built aircraft operated by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, smashed into a mountainside in strong winds, officials said.
"Although the mountains are hard to reach and covered with snow, the relief workers have decided to find the bodies in the darkness of the night," Ahmad Dabbagh-Zadeh, head of the Red Crescent in the southeastern Kerman province told the official news agency IRNA.
He said 60 people from his office were involved in the search of the crash site about 35 km (22 miles) southeast of the city of Kerman which is 1,075 km (670 miles) southeast of Tehran.
No official explanation or hypothesis has been put forward for the crash which killed 284 members of the Sarallah brigade from the Revolutionary Guards.
Formed shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution inspired by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Revolutionary Guards force is independent of Iran's regular army and played a key role in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
Today it numbers about 120,000 personnel and answers directly to Khomeini's successor, current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
A senior source close to the government told Reuters some high-ranking military officials were among the fatalities in Wednesday's crash.
Officials refused to comment on why so many military personnel were travelling together.
The death toll exceeded that of a 1988 disaster, when an Iran Air A-300 Airbus was shot down over the Gulf by the U.S. warship Vincennes which wrongly identified it as an attacking fighter. All 290 people on board were killed in that incident.