Sao Paulo's security authorities said early Wednesday that they had
found 40 bodies after a Brazilian passenger plane carrying 176
people crashed into a fuel station at the Congonhas Airport, likely
killing all the passengers and crew aboard the plane.
The authorities said they recovered 25 charred bodies at the
crash site and 15 others that were taken to hospital.
An Airbus-320 owned by Brazil's TAM airline skidded off the wet
runway after landing, traveled across a busy road at the height of
the evening rush hour in the South America's largest city and
slammed into a petrol station.
Sao Paulo state Governor Jose Serra said rescue crews told him
that there were likely no survivors on the plane.
TAM airline has released a list with names of the crew members,
as well as those of passengers.
A Chinese company employee Li Xianxiang told Xinhua that he saw
a fireball and some black smoke erupted several stories high, more
than 150 meters from the Congonhas Airport.
Some fire trucks, ambulances and police cars rushed to the scene
immediately, he said.
Jose Leonardi Mota, a spokesman with airport authority Infraero,
said the Airbus A320 was en route to Sao Paulo from the southern
Brazilian city of Porto Alegre with 170 passengers and six crew on
board.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had sent the
Brazilian Air Force chief Brig. Juniti Saito to Sao Paulo and also
called an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the crisis with the
ministers of defense, institutional affairs and justice.
Lula also declared three days of national mourning for the
victims of the crash of the TAM Airliner. Presidential spokesman
Marcelo Baumbach told reporters late Tuesday that no death toll or
cause would be immediately released because it would be premature
to do so.
The accident happened during heavy rains, and critics have
warned for years that such an accident was possible at the airport
because its runway is too short for large planes landing when the
runway is wet.
In February a federal court briefly banned takeoffs and landings
of large jets at the Congonhas Airport because of safety
concerns.
But an appeals court overruled the ban on three types of planes,
saying that there were not enough safety concerns to prevent the
planes from landing and taking off at the airport.
Tuesday's crash was Brazil's second major air disaster following
a September collision between a Gol airlines Boeing 737 and an
executive jet over the Amazon rainforest.
All 154 people on the Gol jet died. The executive jet landed
safely.
(Xinhua News Agency July 18, 2007)
