Brazilian emergency crews recovered the remains of 62 victims on Saturday (local time) On board a plane that crashed to the ground in the city of Vinhedo, The plane had crashed near Sao Paulo a day earlier, killing all people on board.
The bodies of most of the victims – 34 men and 28 women – have already been taken to Sao Paulo’s police morgue for identification. Vinhedo mayor Dario Pacheco said the bodies of the pilot and co-pilot had been identified earlier in the day.
Regional airline Voepas, which operated the plane, said the victims included four people with dual nationality: three Venezuelans and a Portuguese woman.
Local outlet Globo News reported that the Venezuelans included a four-year-old boy, his mother, and grandmother. According to the outlet, the boy’s dog was also on the plane, which the family was later taking to Colombia.
On Friday, Voepas had said there were 57 passengers and four crew members on board the plane, but on Saturday the company confirmed there was another missing passenger on board, bringing the total number of casualties to 62.
As bodies were being pulled out of the debris at the accident site on Saturday, fire official Macon Christo said authorities were using items such as seat allocation, physical features, documents and mobile phones to identify the victims.
State civil protection coordinator Hengel Pereira said relatives of the victims had been brought to Sao Paulo to provide DNA samples to help identify the remains.
Marcelo Moreno, head of Brazil’s aviation accident investigation center Cenippa, told a news conference in Vinhedo that the plane’s so-called “black boxes”, which contain voice recordings and flight data, were being analyzed.
The plane, an ATR-72 turboprop, took off from Cascavel in the state of Parana, bound for Sao Paulo, and crashed at 1:30 pm (local time) in Vinhedo, about 80 kilometers northwest of Sao Paulo. Despite falling into a residential area, no one on the ground was hurt.
The Brazilian air force said in a statement that the plane was flying normally until 1:21 p.m. when it stopped responding to calls and lost contact with radar at 1:22 p.m.
The Air Force said the pilots did not report any emergency or adverse weather conditions.
Franco-Italian ATR, jointly owned by Airbus and Leonardo, is a major maker of regional turboprop planes with a capacity of 40 to 70 people. ATR told Reuters on Friday that its experts were “fully engaged” in the investigation into the crash.