A military transport aircraft crashed after take-off and hit a residential building in the capital on Tuesday, killing at least 116 people and injuring scores of others.

Interior Ministry spokesman Mojtaba Mir-Abdolahi was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as saying that "a total of 116 bodies have been recovered" on the spot.

The C-130 aircraft, bound for the Gulf seaport city of Bandar Abbas, reported engine failure shortly after taking off from Tehran's Mehrabad international airport.

After a failed attempt for an emergency landing, the plane's wings hit a 10-storey apartment block at 2:10 p.m. (1040 GMT) in an Air Force residential area on the flight path.

All 94 people aboard the transport plane were killed in the crash, 78 of them journalists, 40 from state television and 38 from other local media, who were on the way to cover military maneuvers in the Gulf, said the report.

Tehran Radio reported that at least 25 residents were killed on the ground because of burning, suffocation or inhaling smoke and 15 others injured, adding that emergency workers sealed off the area.

Meanwhile, the state television said the building, housing some 250 people, caught fire because the oil tanks of the aircraft were full.

More than 90 wounded people were taken to hospital and some of them were in critical condition, it said.

TV pictures showed that the apartment building was seriously damaged, with storeys below the fourth floor engulfed in flames and strong black smoke billowing from the building, while the wreckage of the ill-doomed plane damaged more than 10 cars nearby.

It took fire fighters hours to extinguish the fire.

Some reporters and photographers at the scene could not help weeping at the fact that their colleagues were killed in the tragedy.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who arrived in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, earlier in the day to attend the third extraordinary summit meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference,

expressed condolences and sympathy to families of the victims.

Iran, a country under US economic sanctions, has witnessed a high rate of plane crash due to lack of spare parts and maintenance of aircraft, especially US-made planes.

All of Iran's C-130 aircraft and other US-made planes were imported during the pro-US Shah's reign, which came to an end after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

On June 25, 2003, a C-130 aircraft crashed near Tehran and killed seven.

In February 2000, a C-130 aircraft crashed on take-off and collided with an Iran Air Airbus 300, killing 10.

Source: Xinhua