In the south-east of Turkey, two road accidents which occurred on Saturday August 20 left several dozen dead and around sixty injured. , announced the local authorities
The first killed sixteen people and injured twenty-one, said the governor of Gaziantep province. The event touched ” a coach, a rescue team and an ambulance (…) on the highway between Gaziantep and Nizip”wrote on Twitter the governor of the province, Davut Gül.
According to the Turkish DHA news agency, an ambulance, a fire truck and a vehicle of a team of journalists – which had gone to the scene of an accident – were hit head-on by a passenger bus traveling on the same highway.
Four rescue workers, three firefighters and two journalists from the Turkish news agency Ilhas are among the sixteen dead, according to local media. Images released by the DHA agency showed the rear of a partially shredded ambulance as well as the coach hit in the accident, lying on one side and with the front ripped open.
Sixteen others injured in another accident
A few hours later, sixteen other people were killed and nearly thirty were injured, 250 kilometers further east, in an accident affecting a heavy goods vehicle, according to Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca.
“Sixteen people lost their lives and twenty-nine others were injured, eight of them seriously, in the accident following the breakage of the brakes of a truck which hit a crowd in Derik”in the province of Mardin, said the Minister on Twitter.
Videos broadcast by the Turkish press show a driver losing control of his truck, hitting several vehicles at full speed and pedestrians trying to flee.
According to Turkey’s official Anadolu news agency, a traffic accident involving three vehicles had occurred at the same location shortly before, and rescue teams were on the scene when the driver accidentally rammed into the crowd.