Inquiry follows Italy's worst road accident in years, with 38 dead after coach swerves off motorway and falls into ravine
Prosecutors in southern Italy have opened an investigation into how a coach carrying a party of tourists came to swerve off a motorway and plunge dozens of metres into a ravine, killing at least 38 people and injuring 10 others, several of them children.
In the country's worst road accident for years, the coach hit a string of cars on the A16 motorway before careering off a viaduct, crashing through a safety barrier and nosediving into undergrowth about 25-30 metres below.
Umberto Guidato, the prefect of Avellino, a nearby town, said that six of the 10 people injured were children and that some were in a very serious condition, the news agency Ansa reported.
Emergency services worked through the night to pull passengers dead and alive from the wreckage, using electric saws to cut through what remained of the vehicle. The coach is believed to have been carrying up to 50 people.
"I could hear children crying and shouting from inside the wreckage of the coach and I could hear the voices of two parents calling to them. But I could not see anything; it was completely dark," Emilio Matarazzo, the head of the first team of firefighters to arrive on the scene, told the newspaper La Repubblica.
"My colleagues and I went down there. When we got to the coach, we managed to … pull out five children. They were crying and were injured and were taken to hospital. Others on the other hand didn't make it. There were people stuck between the seats. Dreadful."
The injured – who included 14 people hurt in their cars on the motorway – were taken to hospitals in the surrounding towns.
"It was an immense tragedy when we first had to rescue the injured people who were trapped inside the coach and then successively have had to work to pull out the bodies," Alessio Barbarulo, the head of the local fire brigade division, told Reuters.
The accident occurred shortly after 8.30pm on Sunday as the bus was travelling west towards Naples on a stretch of the motorway near Monteforte Irpino, about 40 miles from Naples.
The coach party, from the region around Naples, had been visiting sights in southern Italy, reportedly including the town of Pietrelcina which is famous for being the birthplace of the charismatic Catholic holy man commonly known as Padre Pio.
Prosecutors in Avellino have opened an investigation into the crash, which will involve a postmortem being carried out on the driver, who was among the victims. It will also examine the technical state of the coach and the conditions of the motorway, including the roadside barrier through which the coach ploughed.
Vincenzo D'Aniello, who was travelling in a car on the motorway when the coach crashed into vehicles around him, told La Repubblica he believed the coach had lost control of its brakes. Other witnesses reportedly said they thought a burst tyre could have been to blame.
"At the moment no theory can be excluded," Salvatore Imparato, a traffic police officer in Avellino, told Ansa. "The reconstruction of what happened is a real work of investigation which we will begin once the bodies have been returned."
Unharmed despite the carnage around him, D'Aniello, from Tirrenia, near Pisa, said: "I thought I was going to die. We are alive by some miracle. Cars suddenly started to rain down on us from behind. I've never seen anything like it. I saw cars overturning. A [Fiat] Panda flew towards my head. It was the apocalypse."
In Greece, Italy's prime minister, Enrico Letta, who was meeting his Greek counterpart, Antonis Samaras, cancelled a private visit to the Acropolis in view of the tragedy. "It is a very sad day for Italy, what happened last night. There are no words," he said.
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