Hungary declares day of mourning for bus crash victims

Hungary has declared Monday a national day of mourning for the victims of a bus mishap in Italy late Friday, which killed 16 members of a Hungarian school group.

In the capital of Budapest, residents have created a memorial outside the school, placing flowers and burning candles by the wall.

The bus, carrying Hungarian students home from a ski camp in France, crashed into a bridge pylon and caught fire in northern Italy just before Friday midnight.

The teenagers all came from a secondary school in Budapest. In the 54-member school group, 43 were teenagers and 11 were adults.

Apart form the 16 deaths, 26 others suffered injuries. Six of the injured were seriously hurt.

Two of the seriously-wounded victims arrived in Budapest by air ambulance on Sunday afternoon, Hungarian television channel M1 reported.

Hungarian and Italian authorities are both investigating the deadly crash.

On Sunday afternoon, Hungarian police raided the offices of Pizolitbusz Ltd., the company from which the bus was leased, seeking information on the condition of the bus as well as on the health status of the two drivers.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said that it would take days to identify the dead since the bodies were severely burned.

DNA evidence will be required. The two persons with life-threatening injuries have not been identified either.

Gabor Csato, director on Hungary's National Ambulance and Emergency Service, who traveled to Verona, Italy, where the accident took place, said that 11 of the 16 dead were students and 5 were grown-ups.

Gabor Toth, principal of the Szinyei Merse secondary school, said that 17 psychologists had been recruited to help the students who had been in the crash as well as their classmates in Budapest. Endit