A construction crew's backhoe tumbled down a hillside onto a school bus on the highway below, killing 21 children and two adults and injuring 36 others, officials said.
The 45-tonne earth mover was being driven along a section of road higher up the hill when it rolled off a ledge and plunged about 20m before crushing the bus on the highway below, said Claudia Cubillos, a spokeswoman for the Bogota Health Ministry, which oversees rescue efforts.
The bus was taking 7- to 12-year-old students from Agustiniano School home in the capital's middle-class Suba district during the Wednesday afternoon rush hour. Traffic behind the wreck was backed up for several kilometers.
PHOTO: EPA
About a hundred emergency workers and police used heavy machinery to try to clear the mangled wreckage and get to the children trapped inside.
Police struggled to hold back families desperate to find out if their children were among the victims.
Laura Ortiz, a travel monitor at the school, said she was supposed to have ridden the bus but asked a friend to fill in because she got tied up in a meeting. She fears that her son was on board.
``I am looking for my son ... I don't know where he is right now,'' a tearful Ortiz told RCN television.
Mayor Luis Eduardo Garzon sped to the scene of the accident by motorbike to show solidarity with the victims and their families.
``It is profoundly painful. We are united behind the families and have asked the attorney general's office to fully explain the causes of the accident,'' Garzon told reporters.
Police spokesman Sargent Alberto Cantillo said it was not immediately clear whether the two adult victims were traveling inside the bus. The bus driver survived unharmed, while the backhoe's driver was in critical condition.
Preliminary findings indicated the backhoe's brakes failed and the driver lost control of the vehicle, Cantillo said. He declined further comment pending the results of an investigation.
It was the deadliest road accident in the capital's history. In 1997, 18 people were killed in a bus collision.
On average, nearly 700 people die every year in traffic accidents in Bogota, though more than half of them are pedestrians.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver