Germans Investigate Woman Whose Car Hit Tour Bus

VOA Breaking News
September 27, 2010 at 6:55 pm

German authorities say they have opened a criminal inquiry into the woman who was driving the car that crashed into a Polish tour bus Sunday, killing 13 people.

Prosecutors said Monday they were investigating a 37-year-old woman from Berlin on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter in the accident. She was seriously injured in the crash.

Police and surviving passengers on the bus said that the red Mercedes she was driving collided with the bus as the car merged onto a rain-slickened highway near Berlin’s Schoenfeld airport. The bus, returning to Poland after a holiday trip to Spain, swerved left and crashed into a bridge abutment.

A spokesman for the Potsdam prosecutor’s office told the Associated Press authorities “assume that some kind of driver error” caused the accident.

Thirty-two people were hospitalized in the accident. Authorities said 18 of them sustained serious injuries. Another six were treated and released.

More than 100 relatives of the victims arrived in Germany, with many of them not knowing the fate of their loved ones. Some of them fanned out to the 15 hospitals where the injured people had been taken. Some information in this story was provided by AP and AFP.