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TEHRAN, Feb 20 (AFP) - More than 300 people aboard an Iranian troop transport aircraft including top brass were killed Wednesday when it crashed shortly before landing in the southeast of the country, in one of the world's worst air accidents.

The Russian-made Ilyushin plane was carrying 284 elite Revolutionary Guards and 18 crew on a flight from the southeastern town of Zahedan when it came down about 35 kilometers (more than 20 miles) east of the city of Kerman, official media said.

There were no survivors.

Rescue workers who rushed to the crash scene reported that they had found the wings of the aircraft but were still combing the countryside for other wreckage early Thursday.

State media stressed that investigators still had no idea what caused the accident but hinted that bad weather may have played a part.

"Air traffic controllers at Kerman airport said the pilot had radioed bad weather, including strong winds, before losing contact" at around 5:30 pm (1400 GMT), an hour after take-off, the official IRNA news agency reported.

The dead soldiers were all serving in the Guards' Imam Ali battalion in Sistan-Baluchistan, a border province centred on Zahedan which is notorious for drug-trafficking from neighbouring Afghanistan.

The Iranian cabinet issued a statement offering its condolences to the families of the dead over this "tragic event".

Iran has had a poor air accident record in recent years, with the crash of a Ukrainian Antonov An-140 near the central city of Esfahan killing 44 people, most of them Russian and Ukrainian aeronautical engineers, only in December.

That crash, which was blamed on pilot error, was a major blow for Iran's fledgling domestic aircraft manufacturing industry which the foreign engineers were involved in helping to set up.

A year ago on Monday, 230 people, most of them Revolutionary Guards narrowly escaped with their lives when an Ilyushin-76 transport caught fire soon after take-off from the northeastern city of Mashhad. The pilot managed to make a successful emergency landing.

Also in February 2002, a civilian Tupolev-154 on an internal flight crashed in southwestern Iran with the loss of all 119 people on board.

The world's worst air accidents remain the collision of two Boeing 747 in the Canary islands in 1977, which killed 583 people, and the crash of a Japan Airlines jumbo between Tokyo and Osaka in 1985, which killed 520 people.

In 1988, an Iranian civilian Airbus was shot down by a US warship over the Straits of Hormuz in the closing stages of the Islamic republic's bloody eight-year war with Iraq, with the loss of all 290 people on board.

Iran has been hit hard by a 24-year-old US embargo on the transfer of key technology that could have been used to update its ageing fleet of passenger jets as the vast country is confronted with strong demand on domestic flights.

At the end of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq in 1988 the Iranian transport ministry agreed to leasing Russian aircraft which had often been in service for many years in the former Soviet Union.

The country's largest airline, Iran Air, has a fleet of about 30 aircaft, most of them US-made Boeings, but which were bought before the 1979 revolution. 

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