Nine German tourists, including six children, were killed on Monday when a helicopter dropped a concrete block on a cable-car line they were travelling on at a popular Austrian ski resort.
The helicopter was ferrying building materials to a construction site atop a nearby mountain when the 750kg block tumbled free, knocking one car off the cable and leaving others swinging so violently that their passengers were thrown out.
More than 100 stranded people had to be rescued from their cars and at least six were seriously injured.
Early reports suggested the helicopter had been flying 300m above the cable-car line when it dropped the block over the Alpine resort of Sölden in the western state of Tyrol.
Television pictures showed bodies on the rocks beneath the glacier.
”Everything happened very quickly and now we have nine people dead,” Ernst Schöpf, the mayor of Sölden, told Austrian ORF television. ”The block dropped on the cable, set it swinging, causing one car to fall and the others to swing around.”
The lift carried passengers between Rettenbach and Tiefenbachferner, two stations in the sprawling ski area.
Initial reports about the ages of the victims were confused.
A spokesperson for the Tyrol emergency services said six German children aged between 10 and 15 were killed in the accident, while the Austrian news agency APA said the dead children were between 11 and 13. Local police said six of the dead appeared to be children but could not confirm their ages.
There was also uncertainty about the number of people who had been seriously hurt in the accident.
A spokesperson for the Austrian Red Cross said that as many as 10 other people had been seriously injured, but Christian Laucher, a spokesperson for the rescue services, said that six other people were seriously injured.
The German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joschka Fischer, was among the first to react to Monday’s accident.
”It was with great sadness and grief that I learned of the tragic cable-car accident at the Tiefenbach glacier in Sölden, Tyrol, in which nine holidaymakers from Germany, including apparently six children, were killed,” Fischer said in a statement.
The broadcaster ORF said the public prosecutor’s office was investigating the cause of the accident.
Sölden, which is close to the city of Innsbruck, is a popular ski resort both in winter and summer, when hikers, skiers and snowboarders take cable cars up to glaciers above the village.
Austria has about 3 000 cable cars and ski lifts, transporting about 500-million people up and down the mountains each year.
Almost five years ago, 155 people were killed when a funicular ski train caught fire in a tunnel near Kaprun, 96km south of Salzburg, in Austria’s worst peacetime disaster. — Guardian Unlimited Â