AT least nine people were killed in a blazing pile of mangled metal yesterday after some 200 vehicles smashed into each other in a chain reaction collision on a fog bound motorway in north west Belgium.
"The route was sunny and then suddenly I saw a thick blanket of fog like a wall," one driver said, as rescue workers battled to free the dead and injured still trapped in the wreckage.
Nine bodies had been pulled out by the afternoon, more than seven hours after the accidents, and firefighters waited on standby to retrieve the rest. So far only tour Belgians, one Dutch national and one French national could be identified, an official said. Their names were not given.
Some of the cars burst into flames in the morning pile up that also left 80 wrecked vehicles on the other side of the €17 motorway between the northern French city of Lille and the Belgian city of Ghent. Flemish BRTN radio said the fog was localised to just 100 metres.
"We have to tread very carefully retrieving the charred bodies, because they could break up with the least movement," a police officer said.
Authorities said 61 people were injured, 30 of them were in intensive care and two of them in a critical condition. A local crisis centre spokesman said the injured had been taken to eight hospitals.
The €17 motorway accident was among the worst of a series of chain reaction collisions recorded in Europe since 1990. The most recent was on February 12th when 11 people were killed and more, than 100 injured in a 150 car pileup in northern Italy. In December 1991, 17 people were killed in an accident, again in fog, on a motorway in northern Spain.