A crowded bus transported dozens of Buddhist pilgrims collapsed in a precipice in Sri Lanka on Sunday, killing at least 21 and hurting 24, said a senior transport official.
The winding roads of the island nation are among the most dangerous in the world, and the accident of a cliff road on Sunday was one of the most mortal recorded in Sri Lanka in decades.
The roof and side panels of the bus were cut, and more than half of the seats were started from the floor of the vehicle, which landed in a tea plantation, showed photos of the remains.
The state bus carried around 70 passengers, about 20 more than its capacity, through the central region of Kotmale, when the driver lost control and deviated from the road before dawn, police said.
“We are trying to establish whether it was a mechanical failure or if the driver fell apart,” said a local police officer to AFPSpeaking under condition of anonymity because I was not authorized to talk to the media.
The Vice Minister of Transportation, Prasanna Gunasena, told journalists at the scene that the injured were transferred to two hospitals in the area.
“Twenty -one have died and we are trying to identify the victims,” Gunasena said.
The toll could have been higher, added the minister, if not for local residents who help extract people from the shattered remains and take them to the hospital.
Police said 24 people were being treated in the two hospitals.
A survivor told a local journalist that he had been in the front section of the bus and was lucky to have escaped with slight wounds.
“The bus leaned to the left side and when the driver was negotiating a curve, he lost control and fell through the precipice,” said the man, who did not give his name, in a video seen by AFP.
The bus was traveling from the pilgrim city of Kataragama in the deep south of the island to the central city of Kurunegala, a distance of about 250 kilometers.
Sri Lanka records an average of 3,000 road deaths annually, which makes the island’s roads among the most mortal in the world.
Sunday’s bus accident was one of the worst in the country since April 2005, when a driver tried to beat a train crossing in the city of Polgahawela. The bus driver was slightly injured, but 37 passengers were killed.
In March 2021, 13 passengers and the driver of a private property died when the vehicle crashed into a precipice in Passara, about 100 kilometers east of the accident scene on Sunday.
