At least nine people were killed and three more were feared dead after a Bulgarian bus carring about 50 high school students crashed into a river between Serbia and Montenegro, police said on Monday.
The bus was returning the students, aged from 13 to 17 years, and their teachers to Bulgaria after a field trip to Croatia when it plunged off a cliff into the Lim river near the Montenegrin village of Gostun late on Sunday.
”Out of 50 passengers, students and teachers from a high school in Bulgaria, so far it is confirmed that nine have been killed and 38 have been taken to the nearest hospitals,” police said in a statement.
”The identity of those killed has not been confirmed yet, and recovering the bodies has been difficult due to inaccessible terrain.”
Police and soldiers rescued 38 people and found one body on Sunday. Another eight bodies were recovered from the sunken vehicle on Monday after police divers arrived at the scene from Belgrade.
All the rescued passengers were hospitalised in nearby towns on both sides of the border between the former Yugoslav republics.
Montenegrin President Filip Vujanovic expressed his sympathies with the families in a telephone call to his Bulgarian counterpart, Georgy Parvanov, according to his office in Podgorica. — Sapa-AFP