80 Children Die as Bus Crashes in Zimbabwe

An overcrowded bus plunged off a winding mountain road moments after passengers begged the driver to slow down, killing at least 80 schoolchildren and seven adults in Zimbabwe’s worst road accident.

Police said the driver apparently lost control of the bus and overshot a sharp bend near the village of Troutbeck late Saturday. Minutes before, some terrified pupils pleaded with the driver to stop and let them walk the remaining 20 miles to their school, a survivor said.

There were earlier reports that the bus’s brakes failed, but police said there appeared to be no malfunctions.

Eleven pupils and a teacher from the Roman Catholic Regina Coeli School survived the accident but were seriously injured. The children on the bus ranged in age from 8 to about 15.

On Sunday, dozens of wooden coffins were trucked to the hospital mortuary in Nyanda, and relatives tried to identify the mangled remains of victims.

“It’s a terrible disaster,” said Home Affairs Minister Moven Mahachi at the hospital. “It’s unbelievable that such a large number of young people could be killed on the spot.”

Information Minister Victoria Chitepo, who also visited the hospital, described the accident as “a devastating blow to the nation, especially when such young people with strong athletic bodies are just wiped out at once.”

More than 100 students, teachers and others were on the 80-mile return trip from a sports outing at another school. The bus was licensed to carry no more than 75 passengers, police said.

Liliosa Manjoro, a teacher, said the driver “stubbornly refused” to heed appeals to slow down or stop. Earlier, the bus narrowly avoided careening into a ditch, she told the semiofficial Zimbabwe Inter-African News Agency.

The driver was killed, along with four teachers, a conductor and a baggage loader. At least one victim was a foreigner, Dutch-born teacher Will von Kalmthout, 39, according to her husband, Marcel.

Manjoro said she was jolted from sleep by “a large bang and frantic screams” as the bus plunged off the road.

Police ordered an investigation into the crash. No charges were immediately filed.

Zimbabwe bus drivers routinely permit extra people to sit or stand in the aisles, often overloading their vehicles. Road safety experts have also accused bus drivers of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

The highest previous death toll from a road accident in this African nation was in November, 1989, when a bus plunged into a riverbed in eastern Zimbabwe, killing 78 passengers.

Most of Zimbabwe’s buses are controlled by the government and are about 20 years old. The few private bus companies that exist depend on government foreign-exchange allocations to buy equipment.

A government squeeze on non-essential imports meant that few new cars and buses entered the country in the 1980s.