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46 People Killed in ‘Horrifying’ Bus Crash in Bulgaria

“I haven’t seen anything like this before,” Bulgaria’s interior minister said after visiting the scene. 12 children are believed to be among the dead.
46 People Killed in ‘Horrifying’ Bus Crash in Bulgaria

At least 46 people died when a bus crashed and burst into flames on a highway in Bulgaria in the early hours of Tuesday morning, local officials said. 

Officials reported 52 people were on the bus including at least 12 children when it broke through the highway guardrail in the western Bulgarian town of Bosnek.

The bus was registered in North Macedonia and was returning from Istanbul. It was one of four that had taken about 200 people from the North Macedonian capital Skopje to Istanbul for a holiday, said Macedonian Foreign Minister Bujar Osmani.

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TV footage of the crash scene showed the bus completely gutted by fire. Emergency workers interviewed by Reuters said the crash was the worst they’d ever seen.

Photo: DIMITAR KYOSEMARLIEV/AFP via Getty Images

Photo: DIMITAR KYOSEMARLIEV/AFP via Getty Images

Several people with severe burns and lacerations were being treated in local hospitals, the handful of survivors were said by witnesses to have been in the back of the bus and escaped through a broken window as the bus burst into flames.

North Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev visited the injured Tuesday afternoon and was quoted on state television as saying many of the victims appear to be children. 

“It is a terrible tragedy because many of them are children,” Zaev said, adding that he had spoken to one of the injured who had managed to break a window of the bus and help several people escape. “He explained that they were sleeping on the bus when a loud explosion was heard.”

Boyko Rashkov, the Bulgarian interior minister, visited the site of the accident on Tuesday “The picture is horrifying,” he told reporters according to the New York Times, adding that identifying victims’ bodies would be difficult. “I haven’t seen anything like this before.”