At least 37 people died early yesterday morning in a spectacular accident involving a bus, a truck and another vehicle in the state of Minas Gerais. General, in Brazil, the security forces reported after noon yesterday.
Initially, firefighters had reported 22 deaths, a figure that increased as the work to rescue the bodies progressed, some of which were “charred and trapped between the iron.”
The Federal Highway Police explained, in turn, that the number of victims is “preliminary” because the fire in the vehicle that the accident triggered made identification tasks difficult.
The driver of the bus, in which it was first estimated that about 45 passengers were traveling, lost control on a section of the BR-116 highway as it passed through the municipality of Teófilo Otoni.
According to the version of the Federal Highway Police, This happened after a “large block of granite” fell from a truck that was passing by at the time and hit the bus, which caught fire and was completely destroyed.
Another vehicle that was following collided with the granite truck, its three passengers survived, although with “serious injuries.”
Another 13 survivors from the bus were taken to nearby hospitals for treatment, according to firefighters.
national mourning
The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, “immensely” regretted what happened, expressed his solidarity with the families of the victims and said he was praying for the recovery of the injured.
“The Federal Government places itself at the disposal of the City Council of Teófilo Otoni and the Government of Minas Gerais for everything that is necessary,” he wrote on social networks. For his part, the governor of Minas Gerais, Romeu Zema, assured that he had ordered the “total mobilization” of the regional Executive and said that the security forces had been working “without interruption” since dawn to deal “with agility” with the incident.