A devastating fire
Officials said, a devastating fire that killed 20 German pensioners on a tour bus may be caused by one of the passengers secretly smoking in the toilet. State prosecutors today started a manslaughter investigation following the blaze, which was the awful bus incident in Germany for over fifteen years.
A spokesman for the Hanover fire brigade, Bernd Keitel, said: “Practically everything on a bus is inflammable, the covering of the seats, and the clothing of the passengers.” One of the charred dead bodies could only be identified by the crutches still lying at its side. Others were cut out of the wreckage for forensic examination, the bodies fused to their seats by the fire’s heat. Police spokesman, Thomas Rochell, said: “We have a big problem with identification. 39 people had booked a seat on the excursion, but some had cancelled and others had come in their place. Now we have 20 dead and 13 on the critical list, and few clues as to who is who.”
The trip had started well enough. The pensioners were on a ‘coffee trip’ to a big tourist-orientated farm in Haltern in North Rhine Westphalia. The farm serves up big meals and is popular with pensioners. After lunching and making purchases, the passengers were tired. Many of them had fallen asleep by the time the bus passed a pit stop on the A2 Hanover to Berlin motorway. One of the surviving witnesses saw a pensioner leaving the toilet, in the centre of the bus near the exit door, and a flame shooting upwards behind him, as if he had dropped a cigarette. From that moment, most of the passengers had only minutes to live.
The driver managed to help a few passengers out of the front. But anyone trapped in the back of the bus behind the toilet was doomed. Police have ruled out any technical defect in the engine. One of the managing partners of the bus company, Oliver Prehn, said: “This was not a defective chemical toilet. It was normal water flush. All I can think of is that the person on the toilet fell asleep while smoking. That could have given time for the ash embers to start a fire – and the smoke did the rest.”
Wolfgang Tiefensee, the transport minister, said: “We will have to look into sharpening up the rules if it turns out the passengers were really unable to leave the bus because of the flames.” The last comparable fire was on a Bavarian motorway in 1992. A total of 20 people died on that occasion, and 35 were injured. Police said today that some of the hospitalized pensioners on the critical list were fighting for their lives and further fatalities could not be ruled out.
