A road crash in Algeria killed 34 people when a passenger bus collided head-on with a pickup truck carrying fuel cans and burst into flames Wednesday, deep in the southern Sahara region, officials said.
The North African country’s deadliest road crash in years also left 12 others injured, many with severe burns, Algeria’s civil defense agency said. President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, on a state visit to China, expressed “his deep distress and sadness” and offered “his sincere condolences” to the victims’ families.
Pictures showed the bus engulfed in a massive ball of flames that lit up the night sky after the crash around 4:00 a.m. (0300 GMT) in a small town near Tamanrasset, a 2,000-kilometer (1,250-mile) drive south of the capital Algiers.
Later, rescue workers were seen recovering bodies from the mangled and charred hull of the bus, in Outoul, 20 kilometers west of Tamanrasset, with the accident scene surrounded by fire engines.
Local residents told AFP by phone that the bus had dropped off passengers and was about to resume its journey.
However, a Toyota pickup truck smashed into it. National gendarmerie official Samir Bouchehit said the truck was carrying gasoline cans and driving on the wrong side of the road.
“The first elements of the investigation suggest that responsibility lies with the driver of the pickup. This vehicle was loaded with gasoline cans that caught fire in the collision. He spoke on the private Ennahar TV channel.
Highway deaths:
Health Minister Abdelhak Saihi traveled to the accident site, promising “all the necessary measures for the care of the injured”, a ministry statement said.
The civil defense agency said the bus traveled between Tamanrasset, a town of 150,000 people, and Adrar, to the northwest, with about 65,000 residents.
Mohamed Boudraa, the governor of Tamanrasset, visited the local hospital where the 12 injured were treated, the official APS news agency reported.
Three of them were later released from the hospital, its director, Abdelkader Bika, told APS. Algeria recorded nearly 23,000 road accidents in 2022, leaving 3,409 dead and 30,000injured. This is according to the country’s road safety chief, Nacef Abdelhakim.
Speed was the main cause of road accidents, according to the state road safety agency.
Tamanrasset is a key transport hub in the remote desert region for the movement of people and goods from Algeria’s far south to the coastal north.
The region, near Mali and Niger, is also a key transit point for migrants from sub-Saharan Africa hoping to reach Europe via Algeria. In December 2020, a vehicle crash near Tamanrasset killed 20 people and injured 11 others, most of them African migrants.
Other countries in the region also see thousands of road deaths annually. About 7,000 people will lose their lives on the roads of Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, in 2020, according to official figures.
Sudan recorded around 10,000 annual traffic fatalities between 2016 and 2019, according to World Health Organization and World Bank figures.
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