At least 13 students died on Sunday when a bus crashed on a highway in eastern Spain while on its way back to Barcelona from a day of festivities in Valencia, Spanish officials said.
The victims were all women, according to Spain’s interior minister. Most of them were believed to be foreigners studying at one of the main universities of Barcelona, as part of the European Union’s Erasmus exchange program.
The bus apparently hit a railing before swerving across the highway and ending up in the opposite lane, where it hit an oncoming car with two passengers, who both survived, according to the local authorities. Jordi Jané, a regional Catalan minister, told reporters that the initial investigation suggested that the bus crash was the result of human error.
The students were traveling in a convoy of five buses that was returning early Sunday from Valencia, where they had attended the Saturday bonfire evening of the Fallas celebrations. The Fallas festival, held every March, is best known for its giant satirical puppets and firecrackers, and it is one of Spain’s biggest street parties.
The accident occurred around 6 a.m. near the town of Freginals, about 90 miles south of Barcelona on the highway from Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city. The bus that crashed was the last in the convoy.
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The driver of the bus was being questioned by the police on Sunday afternoon after receiving psychological treatment. He tested negative for drugs and alcohol, according to the Catalan court that is leading the judicial investigation. He also has no record of any previous accidents in 17 years of bus driving.
The interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, who traveled to the crash site, told reporters on Sunday that the victims were women, without disclosing their identities or nationalities pending the result of a forensic investigation.
The bus was carrying students from more than a dozen countries. After the crash, 43 passengers were initially reported as injured, but by midafternoon, 28 were still in a hospital, three of them in critical condition, according to the authorities.
The crash was one of the worst road accidents in Spain in the past two decades. In 2014, in a bus crash in the region of Murcia, 14 people were killed while traveling to Madrid to attend a religious event.
The highway was closed for most of Sunday as emergency teams worked to clear the crash site, using cranes to remove the bus, which ended up on its side, close to the edge of the road.
The Catalan regional government announced two days of official mourning for the victims. The rector of the University of Barcelona, Dídac Ramírez, told reporters that the victims were “most probably” foreigners studying at his institution as part of the Erasmus program, although it was unclear which students ended up traveling on which bus in the convoy.
[SOURCE :-nytimes]
