when their bus carrying passengers on a pilgrimage to the country’s most sacred Roman Catholic shrine collided with a truck.
The accident happened near the north eastern city of Bialystock from where students in their final year of high school traveled to Czestochowa in southern Poland, the home of the renowned Jasna Gora shrine, according to school principal Zlotka Korzeniewska.
Local police said 60 people were on board when the bus hit a truck from Warsaw head-on, about 32 kilometers (20 miles) into their trip. The force of the impact spun the bus around and caused it to catch fire, officials and witnesses said.
Fire brigade officers rushed to the wreckage on the Warsaw-Bialystok highway in nearby Jezewo, northeastern Poland, but for many it was too late.
PEOPLE IN FLAMES
"The bus was completely burned and people were running away in flames," Polish radio Quoted Jacek Dobrzynski, a spokesman for the fire brigade in the eastern city of Bialystok as saying.
The 13 student victims, most of them 18 and 19 years old, were reportedly killed instantly or soon after the crash, while over 20 passengers were still hospitalized on Saturday, October 1. Bialystok Mayor Ryszard Tur told media he had announced "a three-day mourning period" and urged the city’s residents to donate blood.
The killed youngsters were among the millions of pilgrims who every year travel to the Jasna Gora shrine, which houses an ancient portrait of the Virgin Mary.
Some pilgrims are walking hundreds of kilometers, others take buses or trains to pray before the revered work, which locals say was by painted by Luke, the author of one of the New Testament Gospels. Most Polish people are Catholics, and the Catholic church played an important role in the fall of Communism in the country, which joined the European Union last year, analysts say. (With Stefan J. Bos and reports from Poland)
