Six die, many injured in Polish tourist bus crash in Serbia (Roundup)

Jul 11, 2008, 13:13 GMT

Belgrade/Warsaw - Six people, two of them children, were killed and many seriously injured when a bus with Polish tourists overturned on a highway near Belgrade Friday morning.

The double-decker bus with 68 passengers returning from a holiday in Bulgaria crashed at 7 am (0500 GMT) at Indjija, halfway between Belgrade and Novi Sad, 80 kilometres to the north-west.

A clinic in Novi Sad received 30 injured tourists, seven of them in critical condition. Many among the passengers and the injured were teenagers, Serbian doctors said.

Five of the victims - three men, a woman and the child - died at the scene and another child succumbed in the hospital, which established a hotline number (+381 - /0/63 - 1154811) for enquiries.

Warsaw's consul to Belgrade visited the site of the accident and the passengers, an embassy spokeswoman said.

In Poland, nerves were ran raw as families of passengers awaited information. The Polish government provided a military plane to transport families to Serbia on top of private offers for help.

Polish TVN 24 reported some parents had been concerned over the state of the bus before they send off their children on the trip, but other parents claimed it looked technically sound.

A father of one of the victims told TVN 24 he noticed the vehicle's windscreen wipers were taped together when he saw his daughter off.

The bus had not been paint-sprayed but painted with a brush, he said and added that his daughter had complained of getting wet when the group encountered rain on their way and the bus leaked.

Police, who took the badly-damaged bus for a technical check, said they were still investigating the cause of the accident.

It was the worst such crash in the region since April 2004 when a Bulgarian bus returning children from a to trip to Croatia smashed into the river Lim, killing 12 of the students onboard.

It is also the latest in a series of accidents typical for Serbian roads, where safety rules are widely ignored both by local drivers and tens of thousands of transit drivers.

The number of road crash victims in Serbia continues to rise steadily while falling elsewhere in Europe. In a crash less than 24 hours before, three people died in a car.

A new Serbian law providing draconian fines for violators of safety regulations was drafted more than three years ago, but was never put forward for adoption as political debate dragged on.

In 2007, 964 people died on Serbian roads, bringing the death toll over the past decade to 10,127, along with tens of thousands of injured.