18 FEARED DEAD, 31 INJURED AFTER COACH BURSTS INTO FLAMES
Eighteen people are feared dead after a bus carrying a group of German senior citizens crashed into a truck on a highway in Bavaria on early Monday and burst into flames, police said.
Thirty-one people were injured in the early-morning accident, some seriously, while 18 still considered missing “are believed to have died on the burning bus,” police said in a statement.
Authorities said that forensic specialists were being brought in from Germany’s federal police office to remove and identify the bodies from the charred vehicle. Police spokeswoman Irene Brandenstein said the work was slow and labor intensive given how badly damaged the bus was by the fire.
“The investigation of the accident is very complex and time-consuming,” Brandenstein told The Associated Press.
The accident took place around 7:00 AM (0500GMT) when the bus rear-ended the trailer-truck at the end of a traffic jam on the A9 highway near Muenchberg in Bavaria, not far from the Czech border.
The highway remained closed on both sides for hours and police tweeted later that the road leading south would be shut down for the entire day.
Several helicopters, firefighters and ambulances were on the scene to rescue the injured.
Two drivers and 46 passengers were on the bus, Brandenstein said.by the time firefighters arrived and extinguished the flames, the bus a black, smoking skeleton.
Police said that the group on the bus came from Saxony in eastern Germany and that no children were on the bus. The German news agency dpa reported that all passengers were German citizens.
A phone number was activated to provide family members with information. Brandenstein had no immediate information on the condition of the truck driver.
The accident led to long traffic jams on the A9, which is the main thoroughfare from Berlin to Munich. With the likely toll, the accident at the start of the summer holiday season is one of the worst to hit Germany.
Among the deadliest in recent years was a collision in June 2007, when 13 people were killed as their tour bus drove off the road and plunged several metres down a slope in eastern Germany’s Saxonyanhalt state.
In September 1992, 21 people died when a bus swerved out of its lane and struck a truck before ramming into the road divider in the southern Black Forest region, a key tourist destination. Across Europe, the last such fatal accident struck on 21 January in Italy, when an accident involving a Hungarian bus carrying teenagers left 16 dead. In France, a head-on crash in October 2015 between a truck and a bus carrying pensioners claimed 43 lives as both vehicles burst into flames.