SAO PAULO (AP) — A plane with 62 people aboard crashed in a fiery wreck in a residential area of a city in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state Friday, the airline said, but it was not immediately clear how many people were injured or killed.
The airline VOEPASS confirmed in a statement that a plane headed for Sao Paulo’s international airport Guarulhos crashed in the city of Vinhedo with 58 passengers and 4 crew members aboard. The statement didn’t say what caused the accident.
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.
Video the AP obtained from a bystander and verified shows at least two bodies strewn about flaming pieces of wreckage.
Firefighters, military police and the civil defense authority dispatched teams to the crash site in Vinhedo. Authorities sealed off the entrance to the residential area where the plane went down, as journalists outside watched as official vehicles including ambulances drove in and waited for updates.
Brazilian television network GloboNews showed aerial footage of an area on fire with smoke coming out of an obliterated plane fuselage. Additional footage on GloboNews earlier showed the plane drifting downward vertically, spiraling as it fell.
The Capela neighborhood where the plane crashed sits in a district far from the center of the prosperous city that’s home to 77,000 residents.
The plane departed from Cascavel, in the state of Parana.
