A plane with 62 people aboard have reportedly crashed in a fiery wreck in a residential area of a city in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state Friday, the airline said.
It was not immediately clear how many people were injured or killed but the country’s president said everyone on board was presumed dead.
The airline VoePass confirmed in a statement that a plane headed for Sao Paulo’s international airport in Guarulhos crashed with 58 passengers and 4 crew members aboard. The statement didn’t say what caused the accident.
Brazilian television network, citing the airline reported the aircraft was a turboprop ATR-72 passenger plane.
Firefighters, military police and the civil defense authority dispatched teams to the crash site in Vinhedo, the government said in a statement. The plane departed from Cascavel, in the state of Parana.
Footage of a large area on fire and smoke coming out of an apparent plane fuselage in a residential area full of houses. Additional footage showed a plane drifting downward vertically, spiraling as it fell.
At an event in southern Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked the crowd to stand and observe a minute of silence as he shared the news. He said that it appeared that all passengers and crew aboard had died, without elaborating as to how that information had been obtained.
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“Very sad,” he wrote on social media. “All my solidarity to the families and friends of the victims.”
Video the AP obtained from a bystander and verified shows at least two bodies strewn about flaming pieces of wreckage.
Flight tracker FlightRadar24 said on social media that it was “currently processing granular data from this flight.”
In a subsequent social media post, FlightRadar24 said that in the area where the VoePass plane crashed, there was an “active warning for severe icing” between 12,000 feet and 21,000 feet. Flight Radar said the aircraft was flying at an altitude of 17,000 feet just before the crash.
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