MACHIQUES, Venezuela – A chartered jet filled with tourists returning home to the French Caribbean island of Martinique crashed in western Venezuela yesterday, killing all 160 people on board. The pilot had been attempting an emergency landing after both engines failed, officials said.

Wreckage was strewn across a remote wooded area among cattle ranches near Machiques, 400 miles west of Caracas close to the border with Colombia just east of the Sierra de Perija mountain range. From above, only the tail of the West Caribbean Airways plane could be seen intact, lying amid charred trees.

Rescuers pulled dozens of bodies from the site, and recovered one of the plane’s black boxes, which could give clues to the cause of the crash, the search and rescue chief, Air Force Major Javier Perez, said. He said the cockpit voice recorder had not been found.

As the plane developed problems just after 3 a.m., the Colombian pilot radioed to a nearby airport in western Venezuela requesting permission for an emergency landing, saying both engines had failed. But within 10 minutes, the McDonnell Douglas MD-82 fell into a steep descent and broke apart on impact, Venezuelan officials said. Residents reported hearing an explosion.

“The plane went out of control and crashed,” the president of the National Civil Aviation Institute, Colonel Francisco Paz, said. “There are no survivors.”

The plane was carrying 152 tourists from Martinique, including a 21-month-old infant, returning home after a week in Panama, officials said. All eight Colombian crewmembers also were killed.

At Martinique’s airport, relatives broke down in sobs as a lawmaker read out the names of the victims. In the nearby town of Ducos, where about 30 of the victims reportedly lived, about 150 distraught friends and relatives gathered outside city hall.

“I don’t understand. It’s as though the sky fell on my head today,” Claire Renette, 40, whose sister was among the dead, said.

Officials in Martinique said the vacationers included civil servants and their families who had chartered the flight for a trip to Panama. Town officials called in doctors and psychologists to counsel relatives.

“Martinique is a small place – 152 people dead, you imagine,” a spokeswoman for the Martinique government, Magalie Grivallier, said. “It means virtually everybody had a cousin on that plane.”

“France is mourning,” France’s president, Jacques Chirac, said in a televised statement. He expressed “the compassion and solidarity of the entire nation” to victims’ families.

Mr. Chirac said he planned to speak with Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, “to ask him to do everything so that the circumstances of the tragedy are made clear as soon as possible.”

But the cause of the crash remained unclear. Panama’s civil aviation authority said the plane had enough fuel for the three-hour trip.

France’s transport minister, Dominique Perben, said French aviation authorities had checked the plane twice since May but found nothing unusual. West Caribbean Airways had operated a charter since spring between Panama and the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

America sent four investigators to Venezuela to help.

A former managing director of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, Peter Goelz, said investigators would most likely look for evidence of fuel contamination.

“It’s not unusual to lose one engine. It is unusual to lose both,” Mr. Goelz said. “One of the first things you always look at is fuel contamination.”

Mr. Goelz said he understood both engines recently had work done on them to suppress noise. Within the last few weeks, he said, hush kits – noise suppression devices – were supplied to the engines.

Investigators believed the plane fell at a rate of about 7,000 feet a minute after its engines failed, Venezuela’s interior minister, Jesse Chacon, said. Most of wreckage was spread across a strip of land about 110 yards long, suggesting the plane came in at a sharp angle, the mayor of the nearby town of Rosario, Alfonzo Marquez, said.

“I was struck by all of the victims and the massive destruction,” rescue worker Jose Pena said.

Venezuelan authorities were taking victims’ remains to Maracaibo to be identified, Mr. Chacon said. He said it would be difficult because many were “practically unrecognizable.”

The accident came only two days after a Cypriot airliner plunged into the mountains north of Athens, Greece, killing all 121 people aboard.

Venezuela’s last major civilian crash was in 2001, when an airplane from the Venezuelan airline Rutaca crashed in the southern part of the country, killing all 24 people on board and injuring three others on the ground.

A Colombian airline, West Caribbean Airways began service in 1998. In March, a twin-engine plane it operated crashed during takeoff from the Colombian island of Old Providence, killing eight people and injuring the other six passengers.

Relatives of some Colombian victims gathered yesterday at the airline’s office at the Bogota airport. Among them was Erika Beltran, whose husband Giovani Fallaci was among the flight attendants.

“His passion was to fly,” Ms. Beltran said, weeping. “He will always be with me.”