A Polish tourist bus returning from Spain careered into a bridge on a rain-soaked German motorway on Sunday, killing 13 people and leaving others injured fighting for their lives.
“A car collided with a Polish tourist coach ... [which] then lost control and crashed with full force into the bridge pillar,” fire brigade spokesman Arne Feuring told news channel N24 at the scene.
More than 300 members of the emergency services were at the scene, Feuring said.
“The toll has risen to 13 dead, a man died of his injuries,” police spokesman Jens Quitschke said on Sunday evening.
Nineteen people were also seriously injured, some of whom were fighting for their lives, while 20 more suffered light injuries, he said.
The crash was the most serious road accident in Germany this year, the spokesman said.
Germany’s busy A10 motorway was closed for several hours as emergency services, assisted by half a dozen helicopters, dealt with the injured, cleared away the debris and began their investigation.
Pieces of metal and glass littered the ground around the gray coach, which had its windshield and windows along one side shattered. Tents had been hastily erected nearby to treat the injured.
The bus, operated by coach company Pol-Bus, was carrying 47 passengers and two drivers, a spokeswoman at the Polish embassy in Berlin said, adding that all the victims were Polish.
Police also said there were two children, aged 12 and 13, in the coach, but they could not say what had happened to them because they had no detailed information.
One of those in a critical condition was the 37-year-old woman at the wheel of the Mercedes car that collided with the bus, police said. The driver of the coach was hurt, but his injuries were not reported to be life threatening.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk arrived at the scene on Sunday evening to visit survivors, having flown in on a special flight, the embassy spokeswoman said.
German Chancelor Angela Merkel offered Tusk her condolences and promised that Germany would do everything it could to save the lives of the injured, a statement issued on the government’s Web site said.
A police spokesman said that the car spun out of control at around 10am as it joined the A10 motorway from the A113 not far from the Berlin Schoenefeld Airport, south of the capital.
After colliding with the coach, the car ended up in a drainage ditch under the bridge.
It had been raining most of the night and morning, and investigators have opened an inquiry into the cause of the crash, examining if it was weather-related, police said.
Police spokesman Jens Quitschke said that the coach was on its way back to Poland from Spain and that it was carrying people of all ages, not only young people as reported in German media.
The trip was organized by the forest service of the town of Zlocieniec in northwestern Poland, TVN24 Polish television station reported.
The speaker of the European parliament, Poland’s Jerzy Buzek, was “deeply saddened and shocked by the tragic deaths,” Polish news agency PAP quoted him as saying.
Prosecutors in Szczecin in northwestern Poland said that they would also launch their own investigation.
“There hasn’t been an accident like this with so many people involved in Brandenburg [state] for a long time,” the Bild daily quoted Peter Salender, a spokesman for area police, as saying.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home