Hyderabad: A bus travelling from Bhubaneshwar to Hyderabad plunged into a canal in the early hours of Tuesday, killing at least 11 passengers and injuring 26 others, police said.
The accident occurred at around 5.30am at Mullapadu, in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, when the driver lost control of the vehicle and it veered off into a canal between two bridges after breaking through the barricade.
“We are investigating the cause of the accident and the condition of the driver, who was among the deceased,’ said Umamaheshwara Rao, the deputy superintendent of police in Nandigam. The driver was identified as Adi Narayana Reddy.
As the Bhubaneshwar-Hyderabad journey is 1,000km long, a new driver had taken over at Vijayawada just before the accident, officials said.
Emergency workers used gas cutters to cut open the mangled wreckage of the bus, to rescue survivors and retrieve bodies of the deceased.
Later the bus was removed from the canal by two cranes.
The injured were admitted to hospitals at Nandigam, Gollapudi and Vijayawada. Ten of them were stated to be in a critical condition.
Krishna district superintendent of police Vijay Kumar and district collector Ahmad Babu visited the injured at various hospitals.
The bus owned by Diwakar Travels was carrying 44 passengers and most of them were asleep at the time of the accident.
Andhra Pradesh Transport Minister S. Raghava Rao, who visited the scene of the accident with senior officials, ordered a probe to establish the cause of the mishap.
The deceased included Madhusudhan Reddy of Hyderabad who had boarded the ill-fated bus along with his son Abhishek Reddy while his wife boarded a Hyderabad-bound train at Bhuvaneshwar.
The wife came to know about the accident and death of her husband after she disembarked from the train in Hyderabad on Tuesday morning. Her son Abhishek was seriously injured and admitted to a hospital in Vijayawada.
Another heart-rending story was of two brothers, N. Krishna Reddy and Shekhar Reddy of Suryapet who had engagements scheduled for later in the day. Shekhar Reddy who worked as a software engineer in Bengaluru had come on holiday and had gone to Odisha to meet Shekhar Reddy, who worked as a doctor in Central Reserve Police Force. While returning, both brothers died in the accident.
