Coach plunges off mountain road leaving 26 pilgrims dead

TWENTY-SIX Polish pilgrims died yesterday when their coach crashed off a mountain road at a notorious accident blackspot in the French Alps and burst into flames, officials said.

A further 24 people were injured, 14 critically, when the coach smashed through a roadside barrier on the steep Laffrey gradient, some 30km from the south-eastern city of Grenoble, after apparently suffering braking problems.

The coach careered 40m down the slopes before coming to rest on the banks of the Romanche river.

Most of the victims perished in the fire, said emergency officials, and DNA forensic experts from Paris would be needed to identify the bodies.

Television pictures showed several bodies laid out beneath white sheets on the river banks, the wrecked coach smouldering in the background as fire crews doused it with foam.

Helicopters and a fleet of emergency vehicles ferried the injured to hospital in Grenoble in an operation involving 60 police as well as firefighters.

Robert Caban, owner of the Polish transport firm that hired out the coach, told Polish news agency PAP the drivers were experienced and the seven-year-old Scania coach had passed technical inspections recently in Germany.

France’s LCI television quoted him as saying that he had alerted his men to the route’s dangers. He said he had driven the coach himself recently and its brakes had worked well.

Reports said the Poles, from the Szczecin area of north-west Poland, had been due to return home tomorrow after two weeks on pilgrimage in Spain and France.

President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski were to visit survivors together, French television said.