At least 35 people were killed and 57 injured in separate crashes where vehicles crashed into first responders working at the scenes of earlier accidents on Saturday, in two Kurdish majority provinces in southeast Turkey, the Hürriyet newspaper reported.
Fifteen people were killed and 31 injured on the Tarsus-Adana-Gaziantep highway on Saturday morning when a passenger bus hit an ambulance and a fire engine, both of which had been dispatched to the area to respond an earlier car crash, as well as a news broadcast vehicle which had stopped to cover the crash.
Three fire fighters, two paramedics and two journalists were among the number who lost their lives, according to a statement made by the governor of Gaziantep, revising an earlier death toll of 16.
Nine of the 31 injured are in a serious condition, Turkey’s health minister said on Twitter.
“We saw a horrific scene when we arrived. The situation is terrible. Nobody can understand how it happened,” said Ihlas News Agency reporter Said Vakkas who lost his colleagues in the crash, reported by the daily Hürriyet.
The bus which caused the crash in Gaziantep had been involved in a similar accident in 2017, hitting an ambulance in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa, Demirören News Agency reported.
In a second accident, also on Saturday, an articulated lorry hit another crash site in the Derik district of Mardin where first responders were again attending an earlier accident.
The first accident here occurred “after the brakes gave out on an articulated lorry, which hit a crowd”, health minister Fahrettin Koca announced on Twitter.
A second articulated lorry then crashed into the first responding medical team and members of the public gathered near a petrol station, the Daily Sabah reported.
Interior minister Süleyman Soylu, who went to Derik to inspect the crash site, gave the updated death toll as 20, with 26 injured. He also said that the drivers of the two lorries involved in the multiple vehicle crash in Derik had been taken into custody.
Negligence was the main reason behind the crash in Derik, as the road had been narrowed down to one lane, despite being a major road frequently used by articulated lorries, an official of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said.
