Swiss bus crash: Belgium holds day of national mourning

A photographer said no ambulances were in view when a Belgian military plane
landed shortly after midnight.

Grieving Belgians held an emotional evening vigil late on Thursday as
classmates and neighbours turned out to pray for the dead in Lommel, a
sleepy town of 33,000 where many of the victims came from.

Police said 2,500 people congregated around a Catholic service.

“With this candle, I am thinking of you,” a church worker said for
each of the 24 names read out.

The town’s grief set the tone for a minute’s silence across Belgium due at
11.00am (1000 GMT), with flags flown at half-mast and drivers of buses,
metros and trains asked to switch off their engines as a mark of respect.

Back in Switzerland, grieving parents laid flowers Thursday at the crash site
as investigators sought to unravel the cause of the tragedy.

As some relatives visited the morgue holding the bodies of the 28 victims,
news reports said the bus driver had
tried to play a DVD shortly before the crash
, suggesting a “moment
of distraction” may be to blame.

This claim was rejected by the man’s employer and dismissed as speculation by
Swiss police.

The tunnel where the coach crashed into a wall remained closed to the public
and media were kept at a distance as family members arrived.

Forty-six children and four teachers from two Belgian schools were returning
home from a skiing holiday late Tuesday when their coach slammed into a
concrete wall in the motorway tunnel in southern Switzerland.

Twenty-two of the dead were from Belgium while the other six fatalities were
from the Netherlands.

Three of the injured children remained in critical condition, a Swiss hospital
spokeswoman said, and could not be moved.

The body of the driver was also expected to remain as “health analyses
have to be carried out” to check if he was suffering from an illness
that could have caused the accident.

After police said they did not believe the driver had been speeding, Swiss
authorities said there would be a rethink about safety designs in the
1.5-mile tunnel.

It is believed that the coach clipped a kerb before it slammed into the wall
of a rectangular emergency stop area.

A 60-mile per hour speed limit was also questioned by the press.

While Switzerland pondered how the tragedy had occurred, Belgium’s Prime
Minister Elio Di Rupo told his country’s parliament: “The whole country
weeps for its children.”

Classmates of the dead wept in the schoolyard as Lommel faced up to the
trauma.

Tearful children accompanied by tense parents came bearing flowers, toys,
drawings, candles and words of comfort.

“No more future, no more beautiful children’s dreams, just your
unbearable and endless pain: we share it with you,” said a message left
among piles of flowers at the school entrance.

The toll at this primary school of around 200 children, whose name means “the
little matchstick” in Dutch, was particularly high, apparently because
this group was seated at the front of the bus when it smashed into the
tunnel wall.

“This is a small town where nothing ever happens and everybody knows
everybody else,” said 51-year-old local Peter Flament.

Source: agencies

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