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At least 32 people were killed and dozens were injured in two separate road accidents Saturday, each in places where collisions took place earlier in the day, local media reported.
A first crash involving a bus and an ambulance killed 16 people and injured 21 more on a motorway in Gaziantep province.
Governor Davut Gul said earlier the accident had involved “a bus, an emergency team and an ambulance” on the route between provincial capital Gaziantep and Nizip.
The DHA news agency said a passenger bus had crashed into an ambulance, a firefighting truck and a vehicle carrying journalists at the site of a previous crash.
Four paramedics, three firefighters and two journalists from Turkey’s Ilhas news agency were among those killed, local media reported.
Photos on DHA showed the back of the ambulance ripped out and damage to the bus.
Gendarmes are currently questioning the driver of the bus to try to establish what happened, DHA reported.
Investigation opened
Prosecutors are already investigating a second deadly accident, which also happened as the emergency services were attending an earlier incident at the site.
On this occasion, at least 16 people were killed and nearly 30 injured after a truck driver hurtled into pedestrians in a town some 200 kilometres (120 miles) east, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca.
The accident in Derik in Mardin province “occurred after the breaks gave out on a lorry, which hit a crowd”, Koca wrote on Twitter. Another 29 were injured, eight of them seriously, he added.
Turkish media shared footage of a driver losing control of his truck, then careening towards nearby vehicles and pedestrians as they try to flee.
Turkey’s official Anadolu press agency reported that an accident involving three vehicles had happened at the same site shortly before. Emergency responders were already at the scene when the lorry ploughed into crowd.
Prosecutors in Derik have opened an investigation into the double accident, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag announced.
“All resources are mobilised,” he wrote on Twitter, offering his condolences to those who had lost ones.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sent Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu to the site of the accident and he was expected there later Saturday, the Anadolu agency reported.
(AFP)
