Eight British tourists who died in a crash after a mentally ill man ran out in front of their minibus in a South African national park were killed accidentally, an inquest has found.
The hearing in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, was told that ”Pelepele” Miyawho had spent December 31 2003 playing ”chicken” with cars in the Royal Natal national park before he was knocked down and killed by the trailer towed by the tourists’ minibus.
Although the bus swerved to avoid the 20-year-old, who had stopped directly in its path, the force of his collision with the trailer caused the vehicle to jack-knife.
It then somersaulted across the road before coming to a halt on its side in a ditch. The inquest was told that none of the tourists had been wearing a seatbelt.
Investigators said the Mercedes Sprinter had no mechanical defects and was not towing excess weight with its trailer.
Recording a verdict of accidental death, the coroner, Edward Thomas, said the travel operators, Exodus, had carried out all the necessary checks to ensure the safety of the tourists.
But he said he regretted not being able to hear more from the bus driver, and would have liked to know more about Miyawho’s mental condition.
”If he was a vulnerable person with distorted perception, what I would have been interested in would be to explore the effect of that on his actions,” he said.
”What happened was sudden and unexpected, it was unpredictable and it would have been helpful for us to have been able to go through with the driver exactly his thinking and reaction to what was unfolding before him.”
The eight victims had died of multiple internal injuries which the coroner described as ”fatal and instantaneous”. He told their families: ”It is important that you remember that these were eight people who were innocently going out on a journey, an adventurous holiday which tragically ended in the loss of eight lives and suffering for the three survivors and the families.”
Among the dead was Anthony Egan, a nuclear physicist from Surbiton, Surrey, who helped dismantle the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. His widow, Sonia Willhoft-Egan, who survived the crash, told the inquest: ”It happened so quickly, I have one ghastly long-term thought about it — if I had grabbed hold of him we would either have gone out together or he would still have been in the bus.”
The other victims were: Roger Pearce (60) and his wife Linda (49) from Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire; Neil Pike (35) and his fiancée, Christine Rowe (30) from Preston, Denbighshire; Stephen Moon (56) and his wife, Marion (60) from Maidstone, Kent; and Thomas Harris (65) from Blaenllechau, Rhondda. – Guardian Unlimited Â