MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Peru jet crashes in jungle. A. Argentinas emergency landing.

A Peruvian passenger plane crashed during a severe storm in Peru's northeastern jungle on Tuesday, killing at least 40 people, police said.

A spokesman for the state-run airline TANS said the Boeing 737-200A plane, which was carrying 92 passengers, made an emergency landing without its landing gear 3 km from Pucallpa airport, 785 km northeast of Lima.

The accident happened at 3:06 p.m. (2106 BST), TANS said.

"There are 40 cadavers that rescue teams are pulling from the wreckage. There could be more deaths, we assume some 60 people in total since we've rescued 20 injured persons," a police officer in Pucallpa told RPP radio.

Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo said in a televised address there were between 20 and 30 survivors.

It was the third major accident involving a passenger airplane in less than two weeks, after crashes in Greece and Venezuela.

TANS executive Jorge Belevan told reporters that 92 passengers and eight crew, including the pilots, were on board the plane, which left Lima for Pucallpa en route to Iquitos, in the northern jungle near the Colombian and Brazilian borders.

Iquitos is the largest city in the Peruvian jungle and the navigation gateway to the Amazon.

"The plane was about to land in Pucallpa ... but it was caught in a cross wind ... It did not crash, it was an emergency landing," Belevan said.

He added that the aircraft was built in 1983 and TANS recently rented it from a South African company. He declined to give a death toll.

"It's really a Dantesque scene," said police officer Arioso Obregon.

One witness, Tomas Ruiz, told RPP radio the plane was "totally destroyed."

"The plane made an emergency landing but without its landing gear," said firefighter Ilda Pineda. "The weather was really terrible, there was a fierce storm at the time," a police officer in Pucallpa said.

TANS, founded in the 1960s by the Peruvian air force to help serve remote jungle communities, started as a commercial airline in 1998. It has around 30 percent of the local market, focusing on routes often neglected by its competitors.

In January 2003, a TANS twin engine Fokker 28 turbojet, plowed into a 11,550-foot high mountain in Peru's northern jungle, killing all 42 passengers ? including eight children ? and four crew members aboard.

In four other recent crashes, 152 people died when a Colombian-registered West Caribbean charter went down in Venezuela last week. Two days earlier, 121 people died when a Cyprus-registered Helios Airways Boeing plunged into the mountains north of Athens. Another 16 were believed to have perished Aug. 6 when a plane operated by Tunisia's Tuninter crashed off Sicily. But in Toronto, all 309 people survived aboard an Air France Airbus A340 that overshot the main runway Aug. 2.

Aerolineas Argentinas emergency landing.

An Aerolineas Argentinas plane that left Buenos Aires City's metropolitan airport Jorge Newbery bound for Tierra del Fuego had to make an emergency landing in Bahía Blanca following pressurization problems.

There were no reports of injuries among the 119 passengers or any of the six crew members.