A plane with 62 people aboard has crashed in a fiery wreck in a residential area of a city in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state, an 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 heading to Sao Paulo’s international airport Guarulhos crashed with 58 passengers and four crew members aboard.
The statement did not say what caused the accident.
Wreckage of a plane that crashed by a home in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo state, Brazil (Felipe Magalhaes Filho via AP)
At an event in southern Brazil, President Luiz Inacio 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 Associated Press obtained from a bystander and verified shows at least two bodies strewn about flaming pieces of wreckage.
Firefighters, military police and the civil defence 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 waited outside 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 a plane drifting downward vertically, spiralling as it fell.
The Capela neighbourhood where the plane crashed sits in a district far from the centre of the prosperous city that is home to 77,000 residents.
The plane departed from Cascavel, in the state of Parana.