Twelve people have been killed after a Polish tourist bus crashed and flipped over off a road in Hungary.
The bus was travelling on the M3 motorway, around 90 miles from the nation’s capital of Budapest, at 1.00am on Sunday when the vehicle overturned.
It was likely that the driver fell asleep at the wheel and has since been taken into custody, police said.
Ten people among the 57 passengers and two drivers onboard were also injured in the crash.
Polish President Karol Nawrocki expressed his ‘deep sorrow’ after the accident.
He wrote on X: “I join the families and loved ones of the victims in prayer and deep sympathy.”
Pictures of the badly-damaged bus show it lying at the bottom of a grass verge on the side of the motorway.
Suitcases and belongings can be seen strewn across the ditch next to the bus wreckage.
A Polish tourist bus went off the side of a motorway and crashed killing 12 people in Hungary this morning
The bus flipped and crashed at the bottom of a dry grass verge trapping passengers underneath
Two cranes pictured lifting the bus from the ditch along the M3 motorway about 90 miles from Budapest
Several of the passengers were trapped under the vehicle when it flipped as it crashed, Hungary’s National Directorate for Disaster Management said in a statement.
All of the passengers on the bus were Polish citizens, Polish Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maciej Wewiór confirmed.
The bus travelled from Poland’s southeastern Podkarpackie region and passengers were returning from a pilgrimage in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar offered his condolences to the families of the victims and thanked rescue workers who responded to the crash.
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