Five people were killed and 38 others injured after a bus carrying 44 passengers was involved in a snow accident last night, overturning and plunging down a slope in the southeastern Turkish province of Bingöl.
The terrible accident occurred at around 20:00 yesterday evening on the motorway connecting Bingöl with Diyarbakır as it passed through the town of Doğanca. According to Turkish daily Hürriyet, the bus belonging to the Mardin Seyahat (Mardin Travel) company, which was travelling between Şırnak and Erzurum, went off the road after the driver lost control of the vehicle and fell down a slope.
Numerous emergency personnel, including gendarmes, teams from 112, the Disaster and Emergency Management Agency (AFAD) and the National Medical Rescue Unit (UMKE), were quickly deployed to the scene. The governor of Bingöl, Ahmet Hamdi Usta, also travelled to the area of the accident to follow the rescue work at first hand, and confirmed to the press that the number of fatalities had risen to 5 – initially the Turkish press spoke of 4 – and that there were also 38 injured, most of whom were taken to hospitals in the province of Bingöl itself and the rest to Diyarbakır and Malatya.
One of the injured treated at the Bingöl public hospital, a 20-year-old university student identified as Turan Aktimur, said that he had taken the bus from Mardin and that from Diyarbakır onwards the driver started to go faster: ‘The roads were full of snow and the bus started to skid…. The window on the driver’s side of the bus was broken and we escaped through there. That’s the last thing I remember.’
Fehmi İpek, another 19-year-old university student who was travelling on the stricken bus from Mardin to Trabzon on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, recounted that as they approached the town of Bingöl the bus was going very fast despite the snowfall: ‘It took the curve at high speed, lurched and then overturned. I was sitting in the back, on the left-hand side. I got out of the bus by myself,’ said the witness.
VOTE
EDITORIAL TEAM
🧿 About us
.
Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
…
📣 Your ADVERTISING on Hispanatolia
.
🤗 HELP US WITH A DONATION:
💗 Paypal
