Eighteen killed in bus inferno
Thirty injured as coach carrying pensioners crashes into truck in Germany
EIGHTEEN people were killed in one of the deadliest road accidents in Germany’s recent history, when a tour bus filled with mostly pensioners smashed into a trailer truck and burst into flames yesterday.
Emergency staff had retrieved the bodies of the victims, aged 66 to 81, police said.
The driver of the bus was among those killed, while the truck driver escaped unhurt.
“The blaze was so powerful that only steel parts are still recognisable on the bus – and from that you can understand what it means for all the people on this tour bus,” Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt said.
Thirty people were admitted to hospital – two of them with lifethreatening injuries, the minister said at the site of the accident.
The bus had 46 passengers and two drivers – mostly from the east German state of Saxony – on board when it rammed into the stationary truck in a traffic jam on the busy A9 motorway, police said.
The group was heading for Nuremberg, Bild newspaper said.
The accident happened near the small Bavarian town of Stammbach, in a region dotted with spas and castles that are popular during the summer holidays. Television images late yesterday showed only the charred skeleton of the bus remaining.
Chancellor Angela Merkel voiced great dismay over the crash.
“Our thoughts and condolences go to the victims and their family members, as well as to the injured,” her spokesman said.
“We hope those who have been rescued will recover from their injuries,” he said.
About 200 emergency workers were deployed to the site, including firefighters, rescue personnel and police, while southbound traffic on the A9 motorway remained blocked.
With the likely toll, the accident at the start of the summer holiday season in Germany is one of the worst to hit the country in recent memory. In June 2007, 13 people were killed when a tour bus plunged down a slope in eastern Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt state.
In September 1992, 21 people died when a bus swerved out of its lane and struck a truck, before ramming into a road divider in the southwestern Black Forest, another big tourist destination.
Across Europe, the last fatal accident on a similar scale was on January 21 in Italy, when a horror accident involving a Hungarian bus transporting teenagers left 16 dead.
In France, a head-on crash between a truck and a bus with pensioners on board claimed 43 lives in October 2015.