Three Venezuelans and a Portuguese woman are among the 62 victims of an air accident in Brazil

The accident caused mourning in Brazil / Photo: EFE

Three Venezuelans and a Portuguese woman were among the 62 passengers on a Voepass airline plane that crashed Friday in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, leaving no survivors, the airline reported on Saturday.

Voepass said in a statement that it initially did not include foreigners on the list of victims because all passengers used Brazilian documents when boarding and that it was unaware that four had dual nationality.

“We would like to clarify that, among the 58 passengers, 4 had dual citizenship, of which 3 were Venezuelan and one Portuguese,” the airline said in a statement.

The Venezuelan victims were identified as Josgleidys González, her mother, María Parra, and her son, Joslan Pérez, the latter aged 4. The Portuguese woman who died in the accident was identified as Gracinda Marina.

Testimony

According to neighbors of the Venezuelan family in the city of Cascavel, the three embarked for São Paulo, where they would board a flight to return to Venezuela after several months of residence in Brazil, accompanied by a dog for whom they had processed all the necessary documentation for international travel.

The family had moved to Brazil because the child was born with health problems and was cared for in a hospital in São Paulo. After treatment, the family settled in Cascavel, a city in the southern state of Paraná.

The crashed aircraft, a French-made twin-engine ATR-72-500, was flying from Cascavel to São Paulo with 58 passengers and four crew on board, and crashed about 80 kilometres from its destination.

Place of the accident

Despite landing in a residential area, the aircraft crashed in the backyards of a housing complex without damaging any buildings or leaving any victims on the ground.

By Saturday afternoon, rescue teams had removed the bodies of 42 of the 62 victims from the wreckage of the plane, two of whom, the pilot and co-pilot, were identified by fingerprint tests.

Brasilia / EFE