Coach crash kills 19 Polish pilgrims in Hungary

Nineteen Polish pilgrims died and 32 were injured, some seriously, in a bus crash near Hungary's popular Lake Balaton resort yesterday.

A police spokesman said the bus overturned at a roundabout on the main road between the Hungarian capital, Budapest, and the Croatian capital, Zagreb, shortly after 1am.

Nine men, eight women and two children - a teenage boy and a girl aged six - were killed.

The bus, carrying 49 pilgrims, including a priest, was on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, a shrine to the Virgin Mary, in south-east Bosnia.

Many of the passengers came from Stoczek, a small town near Lublin, in eastern Poland.

Ferenc Vass, a local police spokesman, said it appeared that the driver, thought to be among the dead, had not realised he was approaching a roundabout, veered into its centre, overturned and careered into a ditch, with the bus landing on its roof.

The Hungarian prime minister, Peter Medgyessy, telephoned his Polish counterpart, Leszek Miller, to offer his condolences. Hungary's interior minister, Monika Lamperth, later visited the crash scene.

Police said that one of the 32 injured was in critical condition. Seventeen had severe injuries while 14 were slightly hurt.

The roundabout was built recently to try and prevent crashes at a well-known accident black spot. It is clearly marked but there were no signs the bus had tried to brake.

Lake Balaton, 130 miles south-west of Budapest, is Hungary's main tourist resort and a popular destination for tourists from its former communist neighbours.

The crash was among the worst in Hungary in recent decades. Six people died in September 2000 when a bus carrying children skidded and overturned. Another five were killed in a bus crash in northern Hungary in April the following year.

A Hungarian driver was jailed in January 1998 after his bus, carrying students on a skiing trip, skidded off the road at high speed in Austria, killing 18 people.