The remains of the crashed An-140 plane. (Xinhua/AFP)

    MOSCOW, Dec. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- An Azerbaijani plane carrying 23 people crashed soon after taking off from the capital city of Baku Friday night and all the people on board were killed, according to news reports reaching here.

    The An-140 plane owned by the state-run Azerbaijani Airlines took off at 22:19 (1819 GMT) with 18 passengers and 5 crew members on board on a flight to Aktau, Kazakhstan, and crashed eight minutes later near the capital city, a Baku airport official was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency as saying.

    The wreckage of the plane was found some 35 km from Baku and all the 23 aboard the ill-fated plane were dead, an official of the transport police department told the RIA Novosti news agency.

    The official said rescue workers had arrived at the site of the crash but the so-called black boxes -- the flight data and cabin voice recorders -- of the plane had not been found. Retrieval efforts were complicated by rainfall at the scene.

    Reports said a Briton, an Australian and a Turk were killed in the air crash, and there were also a Georgian and four Kazaks on board.

    Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev arrived at the scene and ordered an investigation, the country's semi-official ATV channel reported.

    Television footage showed fragments of the plane both on land and in the sea, and it appeared the airplane struck a building under construction, knocking down a wall.

A body was carried out of the crashed plane.

    The plane crashed near the town of Nardaran, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Baku, the site of an important Shiite shrine which thousands of pilgrims from around the Shiite world visit every year.

    "Fragments of the plane and the 'black box' have not been studied yet," Azerbaijan's official AZTV network quoted Deputy Prosecutor General Rustam Usubov as saying.

    The black box, an onboard automatic recording device, had not been recovered by Saturday afternoon.

    Azerbaijani Airlines bought the plane two years ago from Ukraine. The An-140 is a medium-range plane with two propeller engines that can seat up to 52 passengers.

    An Azerbaijani Airlines cargo plane crashed in west China in May 2004, killing all seven crewmen on board. Enditem