Eight holidaymakers were killed at dawn on Sunday in a coach accident in Hungary, police said on their website.
The vehicle, which was carrying 54 passengers, was returning from Croatia when at around 4:55 am (02:55 GMT) the pile of a viaduct overlooking the highway, 70 km southwest of Budapest, according to the same source.
The cause of the accident still unknown
Eight other people were seriously injured, one of them life-threatening, and 40 more slightly, reported the MTI news agency.
They were evacuated to hospitals in the region and the capital.
No details have been provided at this stage on the age of the victims, all of Hungarian nationality.
But the operator of the bus said that no child or teenager had died in the tragedy.
The driver died instantly, said an employee of the travel agency, on condition of anonymity.
Fatigue, malaise or technical problem: the first elements collected by the investigators did not make it possible to determine the cause of the accident, declared a spokesman of the police force, and experts will be called upon.
According to images released by the emergency services on the social network Facebook, the vehicle overturned in the ditch.
A "terrible scene"
The firefighters quickly intervened to evacuate bloody passengers, stranded in the gutted coach, while seats were ejected under the violence of the shock.
"They were returning from a day trip to Croatia," testified a motorist present at the scene of the accident, questioned by the information site Index.hu.
“When we saw what happened, we were the first to stop to help rescue them,” he said, describing a “terrible scene”.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Katalin Novak, Minister for Families, both sent their "sincere condolences to the relatives of the victims" and called for caution on the roads, in two separate messages posted on Facebook.
Among the last serious road accidents in Hungary, 33 people were killed in 2003 in a collision between a train and a bus of German tourists in Siofok, a seaside town 100 km southwest of Budapest, on the shores of Lake Balaton, in one of the most touristic regions of the country.
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