Bulgaria-Bus: Corpses were stacked and turned to ashes – Driver killed on the spot

At least 46 people, including 12 children, were killed when a bus carrying tourists, mainly from northern Macedonia, caught fire in a highway in western Bulgaria at around 2am local time on Tuesday.

Seven people, who managed to get out of the burning vehicle, were taken to the Pirogov Emergency Hospital in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, and are being treated in stable condition, according to hospital staff.

They have suffered burns and a broken leg.

The Bulgarian Interior Ministry announced that 46 people had lost their lives, making the accident the deadliest in the Balkan country’s history.

Interim Interior Minister Boyko Raskov said the bodies were “stacked inside the vehicle and turned to ashes”.

“The picture is scary, scary. I have never seen anything like it before,” he told reporters at the scene.

The cause of the accident is unclear, but the bus appears to have hit a guardrail either before or after it caught fire, Bulgarian officials said.

The accident took place on the Struma highway, about 30km west of Sofia, they said.

The hikers were returning to Skopje, the capital of Northern Macedonia, after a weekend of leisure in Istanbul, about 800km away.

” UNCONCEPTABLE TRAGEDY ”

According to the head of the Bulgarian Investigation Service, Boroslav Sarafov, four buses from a travel agency in northern Macedonia entered Bulgarian territory late Monday night from Turkey.

“Human driver error or mechanical failure are the two original versions of the causes of the accident,” he said.

Television footage shows the bus completely burned in the middle of the highway, which was wet due to rain.

“This is a huge tragedy,” the Prime Minister of Northern Macedonia, Zoran Zaef, told reporters in Sofia, expressing his condolences to the relatives of the victims.

Zaef said the passengers were all from northern Macedonia, but there appeared to be a Serb and a Belgian among them. It is not clear, however, whether these two people are among the dead or injured.

Zaef said he spoke to one of the seven survivors, who described to him that the passengers were asleep and woke up to the sound of an explosion.

He said those sitting in the back seats of the bus managed to break a window and jump out.

According to the Minister of Health of Northern Macedonia, Venko Filipce, they are members of the same family and among them there is a 16-year-old.

“Among the dead were 12 under the age of 18”, including five children, whose age is unclear, and “the rest were between 20 and 30 years old”.

“The survivors have been injured, they have lost loved ones, children,” said Maya Arguyrova, head of the burn unit where they were taken.

“The driver died instantly and therefore there was no one to open the doors,” National Police Chief Stanimir Stanev told television.

Zaef added that the passengers came from various communities in northern Macedonia, a country of two million people bordering Bulgaria.

THEY ARE LOOKING FOR THEIR OWN

In Skopje, Osman, a 31-year-old Albanian, told Reuters he had gone to the travel agency with his brother and sister to ask for information about their parents’ fate.

“We do not know if they were in the burnt bus or not. We have no information about them. The agency does not answer the phone. We may have to go to Bulgaria,” he said.

In Skopje, panicked residents try to contact the travel agency that organizes such trips to Istanbul in the hope that their family would not be on the bus.

“We call Besa Tours non-stop, but no one answers,” Xenal Bakiou, who has no news from his cousin, told reporters.

Relatives of the victims have gathered outside the travel agency, whose Facebook page advertises trips to Istanbul twice a week. His offices are closed and his representatives were not available for comment.

The highway where the accident took place was recently completed by EU-funded road projects, of which Bulgaria has been a member since 2007.

However, this section of the road had sharp points, without marking the asphalt, according to a road accident prevention association, which had previously reported the problem to the authorities.

The caretaker Prime Minister of Bulgaria, Stefan Janev, has announced that he is launching an investigation into the cause of the accident, ruling out the possibility that the accident was caused by the condition of the road.

In front of Ismaili Kemal Primary School in Skopje, students burst into tears when they heard that five of their classmates, all members of the same family, had lost their lives.

“Ergin was a friend of mine. He was a very good boy. He was very good. I’m so sorry he died,” 11-year-old Blerim Bush told Reuters.

In Sofia, 45-year-old Adnan Jasarovski says Zuleika’s 16-year-old daughter called him and told him she survived and went to see her in hospital.

“She was crying. Her hands were burnt but otherwise she was fine. She did not say much, she was crying and was in a state of shock. I only saw her through the door because because of COVID I was not allowed to enter the room,” her father told Reuters.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expressed her condolences and “EU solidarity in these horrific moments”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin also sent a message of support.

This was the deadliest car accident in the history of Bulgaria. The last time there was a serious traffic accident in the country was in August 2018: 20 tourists were killed when their vehicle deviated from its course in the middle of heavy rain in a mountainous area north of Sofia.

Bulgaria, a country of 6.9 million people, recorded about 628 road deaths in 2019 and 463 in 2020, a smaller number than is usually the case due to health restrictions that had reduced civilian movement.

These numbers are the highest in the EU and are mainly due to the poor condition of roads and vehicles as well as the excessive speed of drivers.