12 dead, 32 injured as bus plunges into drain

KUALA LUMPUR: An otherwise normal ride to the workplace turned fatal for the driver and 11 passengers of a bus that plunged four metres into a 20-metre-deep storm ditch in a late-night tragedy near the MASKargo complex in Sepang on Sunday.

The dead were the driver of the bus, S. Suresh, 43, and 11 foreign nationals, four of whom were women, from Bangladesh, Indonesia and Nepal.

The foreigners, who were employees of Mutiara Kayamas Sdn Bhd, a company supplying foreign workforce, were to have clocked in for the midnight shift at MASKargo.

The bus skidded and crashed into the ditch. The 32 other passengers were injured, 10 of them critically.

The male foreign nationals killed were Jagarnath Singh Danuwar, 31, and Ramu Chaudhary, 37, of Nepal and Md Razib Munsi, 26; Md Sohel, 24; Mohin, 37; Al Amin, 25, and Golam Mostafa, 22, of Bangladesh.

The four women were Indonesians Ayu, 22; Azura Afrianti, 22; Rosvita Loka Harahap, 23; and Fitri Nurjahari, 21.

The respective foreign missions have been informed of the deaths of the workers.

KLIA (KL International Airport) District Police chief ACP Zulkifli Adamshah said nine of them died on the spot, two at the Serdang Hospital and one at the Putrajaya Hospital.

An initial police investigation revealed that the bus was ferrying the 43 workers to their workplace from their hostel in Nilai, Negeri Sembilan.

“The spot was not an accidentprone area and this was the first time that a fatal crash has taken place there. The weather was fine at that time,” Zulkifli said.

The bus reportedly crashed four metres into the 20-metre-deep ditch, trapping the driver and all the passengers in the vehicle. They were removed by fire & rescue personnel.

The operations centre of the Selangor Fire & Rescue Department said 37 officers and personnel who arrived in five trucks from the KLIA, Cyberjaya and Sepang fire & rescue stations helped to remove the dead and injured from the bus.

Meanwhile, Director-General of Health Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said in a statement yesterday that 14 of the injured were in a semi-critical state.

“The injured were rushed to the Putrajaya, Serdang, Banting and Kajang hospitals,” he said.

The Putrajaya Hospital Emergency Medicine Coordination Centre, soon after being alerted at 11.16 pm Sunday, coordinated a response team with the Salak Health Centre being the first to be activated to provide assistance at the accident spot, followed by response teams from other nearby facilities. Bernama