The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, regretted “immensely” what happened.
At least 38 people died in a spectacular accident involving a bus, a truck and another vehicle in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, security forces reported.
Initially, firefighters had reported 22 deaths, A figure that increased throughout the day as the work to rescue the bodies progressed, some of which were “charred and trapped between irons.”
The Federal Highway Police explained, in turn, that The number of victims is “preliminary” because the fire in the vehicle that the accident caused made identification tasks difficult..
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The driver of the bus, which was first estimated to have about 45 passengers on it, lost controll on a section of the BR-116 highway as it passes through the municipality of Teófilo Otoni, a rural area.
According to the version of the Federal Highway Police, this happened after a “large block of granite” fell from a truck who was passing by at that time and hit the bus, which caught fire and ended up completely destroyed.
Next, another vehicle that was following collided with the granite truckalthough its three passengers survived with “serious injuries.”
Another 13 survivors from the bus were taken to nearby hospitals. to be attended to, according to the firefighters.
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The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, regretted “immensely” what happened, He expressed his solidarity with the families of the victims and said he prayed for the recovery of the injured.
“The federal government places itself at the disposal of the City Council of Teófilo Otoni and the Government of Minas Gerais for everything necessary,” he wrote on social networks.
For its part, The governor of Minas Gerais, Romeu Zema, assured that he had ordered the “total mobilization” of the regional Executive and said that the security forces had been working “without interruption” since early morning to deal with the incident “quickly.”
