early Monday, July 1, near Hungary’s popular Lake Balaton resort, police officials said.
Police investigators told reporters it was dark when the bus slid off a road and overturned while going through a roundabout on the outskirts of the village of Balatonszentgyorgy, about 120 kilometres (70 miles), south west of the capital Budapest.
Rescue workers said they had recovered the remains of at least 19 people who were killed in the incident, including a teenaged boy and a girl of around six years old.
Ferenc Vass, spokesman for the local Somogy county police, told news media the death toll also included one of the drivers and eight other men as well as eight women. There were fears that the death toll could rise as dozens of people were rushed to nearby hospitals with serious injuries. It was apparently difficult to reach the wounded passengers.
MOTHER AND SON
Hungarian radio reported that a mother and her 13-year-old son trapped in the wreckage had to wait for a crane to lift the bus in order to be freed. They received infusions and first aid from emergency workers who crawled to them in the bus, the state run radio said.
The bus, carrying 49 pilgrims, including an apparently injured priest and two drivers, was bound for, a shrine to the Virgin Mary in southeast Bosnia. Many of the passengers were from Stoczek, a small town near the city of Lublin in eastern Poland.
"It was a group of pilgrims heading for Medjugorje. These were people coming from the area, but also a few from remote locations," said Father Wlodzimierz Machulak, head of the Stoczek monastery, in an interview with the Reuters news agency.
NOT FIRST PILGRIMAGE
"This was not the first such pilgrimage organized by Father Stefan (believed to be among the injured). The transport was provided by a private firm," he added. The Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller described the accident as "tragic news" for his mainly Catholic nation.
Hungarian Interior Minister Monika Lamperth and the national police chief Laszlo Salgo rushed to the scene and expressed condolences to relatives of the victims. "I would like to affirm that Hungary will do everything in its power to keep the families of the victims informed," state radio quoted her as saying.
The latest accident was expected to lead to a new debate about the notorious bad roads around most stretches of the Balaton Lake, one of the largest lakes in Europe, where cars often compete with horses and bicycles.
It is however an important route for Catholic pilgrims on their way to the former Yugoslavia. Hungary, which has only a few main highways, is under pressure to improve its transit roads towards neighboring countries as it prepares to join the European Union in 2004.
