Seven people were killed and two were injured in western Hungary in the early hours of this morning when a minibus carrying nine passengers crashed into a truck that had been stopped due to an earlier accident on the M1 motorway, police said. Another person was killed in the earlier accident, making a total of eight dead.
Chain of accidents near Győr
The accident near Győr, 122 kilometers west of Budapest, followed an earlier accident in the same area in which a truck crashed into a construction vehicle, causing one person to die and traffic to a standstill.
A truck crashed into several stationary construction machines early Friday morning at kilometer 115 of the M1 highway, in the Töltéstava area, heading towards Hegyeshalom. The vehicle pushed the machines towards each other, then the cabin caught fire and the fire spread to the cargo, the disaster management agency said on its website.
Firefighters from Győr intervened and prevented the fire from spreading.
The victims are foreign nationals
Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar said in a Facebook post that the victims were foreign nationals. “I express my sincere condolences to the families,” he said.
Magyar did not specify the nationality of the victims, and police did not immediately respond to questions from Reuters.
Police told the media that all the dead were male adults, that the minibus had Moldovan license plates and that the truck involved in the first accident also had Moldovan license plates.
(TYPE/Source: Hina/Photo: Hungarian Ministry of National Disaster Management)
