Early on Sunday morning there was an accident on the A5 in the Wetterau at around 4.40 a.m. with four dead and several injured.
Two people were taken to hospital with injuries, some of them life-threatening.
Among the victims are a nineteen-year-old, a nineteen-year-old and a 33-year-old man from the Gießen district.
A 68-year-old man from Frankfurt also died.
A 19-year-old woman and a 19-year-old man have been rushed to hospitals with life-threatening injuries by rescue helicopter.
A fifty-two-year-old man from the Rheingau-Taunus district was slightly injured.
As a result of flying debris, there were also several consequential accidents on the opposite lane, but only property damage occurred.
The police had to close the motorway between Friedberg and Ober-Mörlen for more than six hours. At times the road was completely closed in both directions. How the accident came about is still unclear. There was talk of a wrong-way driver. "According to the current state of knowledge, we have to assume that he apparently also has to do with the course of the accident," said a police spokeswoman. However, she did not give details on request, the investigations were ongoing, said a spokesman for the FAZ. By the afternoon there was no certainty that the wrong-way driver was involved. An expert should clarify the circumstances of the accident.
Coming from the Bad Homburg intersection, a traffic jam several kilometers long formed after the autobahn was closed.
As a result of the collision, fuel had leaked that still had to be removed from the lane.
The work continued until the early afternoon, and the road has now been cleaned.
The traffic flows freely again.
A similarly serious traffic accident occurred in Hesse in 2013.
At that time, five people were killed on the B 260 between Nassau and Bad Schwalbach.