41 Killed in Peru Air Crash

At least 41 people were killed when a Peruvian airline on a domestic flight crashed in a jungle region yesterday, police said today.

Ffity-six passengers and crew survived after the Tans Boeing 737 aircraft came down while attempting an emergency landing, a regional official said.

The pilot attempted to land in a marsh, but the impact split the aircraft in two, the official added.

The flight, from Lima to Iquitos, crashed near Pucallpa airport late yesterday after the pilot radioed that he was unable to land because of strong winds and torrential rain, Norma Pasquel, a receptionist at the airport said.

The plane circled the airport before crashing near a highway, according to officials and radio reports.

Police said 41 bodies had been recovered and 56 people were being treated at local hospitals.

Police said an American woman, an Italian man and a Colombian woman were among the dead.

Police spokesman David Mori said many of the bodies could not immediately be identified, and at least three people were considered to be missing.

"There were people who walked away from the crash uninjured," Mr Mori said. "It's not very clear how many."

The Canal N television channel broadcast photo images of survivors being carried on stretchers from a grassy field strewn with wreckage.

"I felt a strong impact and a light and fire and felt I was in the middle of flames around the cabin until I saw to my left a hole to escape through," crash survivor Yuri Gonzalez told Peruvian radio. "Two other people were struggling to get out and I also was able to."

He said he heard another person shouting to him to keep moving because the plane was going to explode. "The fire was fierce despite the storm," he said. "Hail was falling, and the mud came up to my knees."

Jorge Belevan, a spokesman for Tans, said the plane had been carrying 92 passengers and eight crew members. He said that two of 11 Americans aboard were unaccounted for, and that the others were hospitalised for the treatment of unspecified injuries.

"The preliminary information we have is that the accident could have been caused by wind shear," he said.

Wind shear is a sudden change in wind speed or direction. The most dangerous kind, called a microburst, is caused by air descending from a thunderstorm.

"It seems it was a matter of the weather," Tomas Ruiz, another passenger, told Radioprogramas. "Ten minutes before we were to land in Pucallpa, the plane began to shake a lot."

The crash is the fourth recent weeks. Last week, 152 people died when a Colombian-registered West Caribbean charter went down in Venezuela.

Two days earlier, 121 people were killed when a Cyprus-registered Helios Airways Boeing crashed into mountains north of Athens.

Another 16 were believed to have died on August 6 when a plane operated by Tuninter, of Tunisia, crashed off Sicily.

On August 2, an Air France Airbus A340 burst into flames after overshooting the runway on landing at Toronto airport. All 309 crew and passengers survived.