Battle to identify five crash victims

FIVE people killed when the car they were travelling in rolled down an embankment near the Nanaga intersection on Sunday night have still not been identified due to the absence of any form of identification at the scene of the crash.

Detectives said none of the victims – four men and a woman – had any identification or cellphones on them at the time of the accident at the N2/N10 intersection, some 50km from Nelson Mandela Bay.

Emergency medical services from both the Sarah Baartman and Nelson Mandela Bay districts spent hours at the scene recovering the Mazda Sting.

Medics used the jaws of life to remove the bodies of the victims, believed to be aged between 25 and 40.

Initially, authorities believed there were only four victims due to the way in which the vehicle landed on the embankment.

Police spokesman Constable Mncedi Mbombo said the vehicle, travelling from Grahamstown to Port Elizabeth, veered off the road at about 7pm.

“The driver lost control of the car and it veered off the road . . . The vehicle then rolled several times down the embankment. There were no brake marks on the road surface, so the cause of the car veering off the road is unknown,” he said. He said the driver was not the owner of the car. “The owner has been contacted . . . to assist with identifying those who were in the vehicle.”