A few hours before dawn on Tuesday, a bus carrying most tourists from North Macedonia caught fire and crashed on a highway in western Bulgaria, killing at least 45 people, including 12 children.
The hospital staff said that the seven people who jumped off the burning bus were taken to the hospital in Sofia in a stable condition. The Bulgarian Ministry of Interior stated that 45 people were killed, which is the deadliest bus accident in the country’s history. The Interior Minister Boyko Rashkov stated that the corpses were “gathered inside and burned to ashes”.
“This picture is terrible, terrible. I have never seen anything like this before,” he told reporters at the scene.
Bulgarian officials said the cause of the accident is not yet known, but the bus appeared to hit the road barrier before or after the fire.
Bulgarian officials said the accident occurred at about 2 am local time on the Struma Highway, about 30 miles (45 kilometers) west of Sofia. The coaching party returned to Skopje from a weekend holiday trip in Istanbul, covering approximately 500 miles.
Television footage showed that the bus was scorched and burnt in the middle of the rain-drenched highway.
Bulgaria’s interim prime minister Stefan Yanev said: “We have had a huge tragedy here.”
The Prime Minister of North Macedonia Zoran Zaev (Zoran Zaev) said that he had talked to a survivor who told him that the passenger was sleeping when he was awakened by the explosion. “I am scared. This is a huge tragedy,” he told the TV channel BTV.
Borislav Sarafov, head of the Bulgarian investigation department, said that four buses from a travel agency in North Macedonia entered Bulgaria from Turkey late on Monday. “The driver’s human error or technical failure are the two initial versions of the accident,” he said.
