in Thailand at least 23 people have died in the school bus accident, the local police say.
A bus carrying schoolchildren caught fire on Tuesday in a suburb north of Bangkok.
“We found 23 bodies inside the bus,” the director of the police forensics office Trairong Phiwpan told reporters.
The bodies of the victims were so badly burned that the police have not yet been able to confirm how many of those who died in Turma were adults and how many were children. According to the police, DNA tests are needed to identify the victims.
“Some of the bodies were very, very small. They must have been very young,” the search leader Piyalak Thinkaew told reporters at the scene, adding that the fire started at the front of the bus.
“The children’s instinct was to run to the back of the bus, so the bodies were found there,” he said.
The police also said they were looking for the bus driver who had fled the scene.
Bus was one of three buses carrying schoolchildren that had left Uthai Thani province. The school groups were on their way to the science museum in the northern part of Bangkok. The bus’ tire burst on a highway in the northern suburbs of Bangkok, causing the vehicle to crash into an obstacle, a rescue worker told local television.
A total of 44 people were on board the bus, of which 38 were students and six were teachers. The youngest of the children were of kindergarten age and the oldest were young teenagers.
The crash is believed to be Thailand’s deadliest traffic accident in a decade. The country’s traffic is one of the most dangerous in the world and about 20,000 people die every year.
Prime minister of the country Paetongtarn Shinawatra visited the survivors in the hospital and said that the government will pay for the medical care of the survivors of the accident and compensation for the families of the victims.
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