Mina Basaran was posting images of her trip to her popular Instagram account, which has more than 58,000 followers. The last photo on her account showed her surrounded by seven other young women, all wearing robes and sunglasses. The post, tagged #minasbachelorette, said it was taken at the One and Only Royal Mirage luxury hotel in Dubai.

Shortly before the plane - reported to have been a Bombardier C600 series - dropped off the radar, the pilot requested to fly at a lower altitude, Iran's Civil Aviation Authority told local media outlets. Images on social media showed a large plume of black smoke emerging from the Zagros Mountains near Shahr-e Kord in Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari province.

By late on Sunday evening, just a few hours after news of the crash, there were more than 7000 comments on the photo.

"The wreck of the jet and the bodies are found. They will be carried down from the mountain when sun comes up. My condolences to those who lost their loved ones," the head of the Turkish Red Crescent, Kerem Kinik, said on Twitter, citing his Iranian sister organisation.

Local residents who had reached the site of the crash said there appeared to be no survivors and victims' bodies were burnt, ISNA news agency reported, quoting Mojtaba Khaledi, spokesman for Iran's emergency services.

Melike Kuvvet, the captain of the jet, was one of the first female pilots in the Turkish military, before she resigned and started to work in the private sector, Turkish media reports said.

The bodies of the passengers and crew could not yet be identified, a spokesman for Iran's emergency services, Shahin Fathi, was quoted as saying by Iranian news agencies. DNA tests will be conducted to identify the dead.

In February, a passenger aircraft carrying 66 people crashed during a blizzard into Mount Dena, near the Iranian city of Yasuj. Rescue operations took several days because of extreme weather conditions and insufficient preparedness by the emergency services.