The accident happened on a highway some 60 km north of Zagreb.
Twelve Poles were killed and around 30 others injured on Saturday in the accident of a bus in northern Croatia, probably Catholic pilgrims on their way to the Medjugorje sanctuary in Bosnia, announced the Croatian Minister of Foreign Affairs. Interior. Initially, the Croatian Interior Ministry announced on Twitter the death of 11 people.
“Unfortunately, a person hospitalized has died in the meantime, which means, at this moment, that twelve people have been killed in this accident”, declared during a press conference in Varazdin (north), the Minister of Interior Davor Bozinovic. Around 30 people were injured, 18 of them seriously, and were transported to several hospitals in Zagreb, said Croatian emergency services director Maja Grba Bujevic. Sixteen medical emergency teams were dispatched to the scene, according to the same source. The accident occurred in the morning on a highway some 60 km north of Zagreb, as the bus was heading towards the Croatian capital. “The bus veered off course and slid into the ditch along the highway,” police spokesman Matko Muric told AFP.
An official at the Polish consulate in Croatia, Dagmara Lukovic, said the passengers were “Polish citizens”. “According to some information, this is a group that planned to go on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje”, site of a famous Marian Catholic shrine in Bosnia, the minister said, adding that their bus was registered in a small locality near Warsaw. The Medjugorje site is visited each year by hundreds of thousands of people, including many Poles. “We are doing everything and we will do everything to treat those who are still in serious condition in Croatian hospitals,” said Bozinovic.
Thousands of Polish tourists to Croatia every year
The traffic is particularly heavy in the summer period on the roads of Croatia which welcomes millions of tourists every year, especially on the Adriatic coast. Polish tourists are among the most numerous there: between January and July, more than 580,000 Polish tourists visited Croatia.
In July 2021, ten Kosovo nationals were killed in a bus accident on a highway in eastern Croatia. In another serious bus accident last November in Bulgaria, 46 people, mostly from North Macedonia, burned to death in the vehicle which caught fire on a highway.