Sofia, Nov. 23 (BNA) At least 45 people, including 12 children, were killed when a bus carrying tourists from North Macedonia crashed on a highway in western Bulgaria hours before dawn Tuesday, officials said.
Hospital staff said that seven people who jumped from the burning bus were taken to the Pirogov emergency hospital in the Bulgarian capital Sofia and are in stable condition. They got burns and one of them broke.
The Bulgarian Interior Ministry said 45 people died, making it the deadliest bus accident in the Balkan country’s history.
Interim Interior Minister Boyko Rashkov said the bodies were “clustered inside, burning and reduced to ashes”.
“The picture is terrifying and terrifying. I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he told reporters at the site, according to Reuters.
Bulgarian officials said the cause of the accident was not clear, but the bus appeared to have hit a barrier on the highway either before or after it caught fire.
They added that the accident took place on the Stroma highway, about 30 km west of Sofia, around 2 am (0200 GMT).
The bus was returning to Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, after a weekend trip to Istanbul, a journey of about 800 kilometers (500 miles).
“Human error on the part of the driver or a technical failure are the first two versions of the accident,” Sarafov said.
Television footage showed the bus standing upright, but charred and ravaged by fire, in the middle of a highway drenched in rain.
“This is a great tragedy,” North Macedonia Prime Minister Zoran Zeev told reporters in Sofia, expressing his condolences to the relatives of the victims.
Zaev said all the passengers were from North Macedonia, but it appeared that they included a Serb and a Belgian. It was not clear if the two were among the victims or injured.
Zaev said he spoke to one of the seven survivors and told him that the passengers were asleep when they were woken by an explosion.
He said those in the back of the bus managed to break the window and jump out.
Zaev said the passengers were from different communities in North Macedonia, a country of two million that borders Bulgaria and has an ethnic Albanian minority.
In Skopje, Osman, who is of Albanian origin, told Reuters he had come to the travel agency’s office with his brother and sister to get information about their parents.
“We don’t know if they were on the bus that crashed or not. We have no information about them. The agency is not answering the phone. Maybe we will need to go to Bulgaria,” he said.
Albanian Foreign Minister Ulta Shaka said the passengers were of Albanian origin in North Macedonia.
“Great grief for the lives of 45 Albanians from North Macedonia during the tragic accident in Bulgaria,” he said on Twitter.
HF