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)