TEHRAN - Investigators found two of the black boxes from Wednesday's fatal Caspian Airlines crash, Iranian English-language state Press TV reported on Thursday morning.
"Iran has recovered two black boxes from the passenger plane that crashed in the northwest of the country," the TV anchor said.
Though badly damaged, investigators hope to retrieve data to analyze what went wrong.
Authorities are still searching for a third black box in the widely scattered rubble, Iran's state news agency, FARS, reported.
The Russian-built Tupolev airliner went down 16 minutes after takeoff from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport on Wednesday, killing all 153 passengers and 15 crew members aboard.
Iran's Deputy Transport Minister Ahmad Majidi said identifying victims' remains would require DNA testing.
"All gathered parts of dead bodies scattered in the crash area have been handed over to Qazvin's coroner office and will be transferred to Tehran's coroner office today," FARS quoted Majidi as having said.
The passenger plane was en route to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, when eyewitnesses said the tail section burst into flame before the aircraft went down in a field outside the city of Qazvin, exploding on impact.
Source: Reuters