A day of reflection today, the day after the accident of a tourist bus that claimed the lives of 46 people in Bulgaria, most of them from Northern Macedonia, as details begin to become known about the “horror” of the tragic event.
The tragedy occurred yesterday, Tuesday, around 02:00 in the morning on a highway, 40 km south of Sofia.
The vehicle was part of a convoy of four tourist buses, carrying tourists returning from a weekend in Istanbul and 12 of whom were minors. He was heading to Skopje overnight when he crashed into the guardrail on a slippery road due to rain.
“The tires burst and a fire broke out,” said Lulzim Suleimani, one of the seven survivors, from the hospital room where he is being treated in Sofia.
“There was a lot of smoke, people started vomiting, screaming, like in a horror movie,” he told Klan Macedonia.
“I took the hammer of the bus and broke the glass, I took my fiancée and five other people with me,” said the 26-year-old man, who hails from Serbia.
His fiancée, 25-year-old Medina Lutfi, was asleep, like most passengers, and vaguely remembers the events.
“I do not know how I got out. When I saw the window open behind my head, I jumped. “I heard children crying,” he said.
The survivors, who are being treated for fractures and burns, are suffering from “huge stress”, Maya Argirova, head of the burn center where they are being treated, told reporters.
The Bulgarian Minister of Interior had spoken yesterday, Tuesday, about a “horror scene”, describing “corpses on top of each other and charred”.
An investigation is being conducted to determine the causes of the accident, whether it is a technical problem or a human error.
The flags fluttered at half-mast and there was a minute’s silence: “Today is a day of mourning in which we humbly honor the memory of the victims,” ​​interim Bulgarian Prime Minister Stefan Janev said at the start of a cabinet meeting, before a minute’s silence.
In front of the embassy of Northern Macedonia in Sofia, citizens have left flowers, candles and stuffed animals. A three-day national mourning period was declared in the neighboring country of Bulgaria.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken took to Twitter to offer his condolences to the relatives of the victims.
In Europe, one has to look back to 2010 to find another such tragic accident: 45 people were then killed in Ukraine in a train-bus collision on a level crossing.
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