In a pile-up in southern Turkey on Saturday, according to the Turkish authorities 16 people died and 22 people were injured. The dead are three firefighters, four paramedics and two journalists, according to the governor of the Gaziantep province. On the highway between the cities of Gaziantep and Nizip, a bus collided with several stationary vehicles and people, who were on the scene to provide assistance in a previous accident in which a car had run off the road.
A journalist from the Ihlas news agency survived the accident. He tells from the hospital that he was on the scene with colleagues and the emergency services after the earlier accident. “It took an hour to get an injured person out of the car into the ambulance.” As the journalist passed in front of the ambulance, he saw a passenger bus approaching the ambulance at high speed. “I yelled, ‘Go away. After that, I don’t remember anything,” said the journalist.
In Turkey, last year, according to official government statistics, 5,362 people were killed in road accidents. At the beginning of August, 15 people were killed in a bus accident in western Turkey in Balikesir province.
Update 4:51 PM: An earlier version of this message stated that two ambulance workers were killed. That turned out to be four and has been adjusted.