At least 46 people have been killed in Peru after a bus collided with a truck and fell from a cliff while travelling on a stretch of highway known as the “Devil’s Curve”, police and fire officials said.
The bus was carrying 57 passengers to Peru’s capital when it collided with a tractor trailer before noon and plunged down the slope, said Claudia Espinoza from Peru’s voluntary firefighter brigade on Tuesday.
The bus came to rest upside down on a narrow strip of shore next to the Pacific, with the bodies of passengers strewn among the rocks.
“There is a large number of fatal victims,” Col Dino Escudero told RPP radio.
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Rescuers were working to pull victims from the hard-to-reach area in Pasamayo, about 70 km north of Lima.
No road leads directly to the beach, complicating rescue efforts, Ms Espinoza said, though police and firefighters managed to transport five survivors with serious injuries to a nearby hospital.
Ms Espinoza said the passengers in Tuesday’s crash included many who were returning to Lima after celebrating the New Year’s holiday with family outside the city.
The highway is known as the Devil’s Curve because it is narrow, frequently shrouded in mist and curves along a cliff that has seen numerous accidents.
Traffic incidents are common in Peru, with more than 2,600 people killed in 2016. More than 36 people died when three buses and a truck collided in 2015 on the main costal highway. Twenty people were killed in November when a bus plunged off a bridge into a river in the southern Andes. –Guardian/AP/Reuters