MOSCOW, September 7 (RIA Novosti) – Eight people were killed in northwestern Russia on early Saturday when a bus carrying political activists rammed a passenger coach on the federal highway.
Police said hours after the crash in Pskov Region that the death toll rose to nine, but later refuted the report, adding that some of the bodies were badly damaged.
At least 20 people were injured, 10 of them remaining hospitalized, including two in serious condition, a spokesman for the region’s emergency services said.
The victims included two Latvian citizens, a spokeswoman for regional police said.
The two buses – a MAN coach bound for Latvia and a Hyundai transporting political activists – held more than a combined 100 people, reports said.
The authorities tentatively blamed the crash on the Hyundai driver who apparently fell asleep at the wheel and steered the bus into the opposite lane, the emergency services spokesman said. It remained immediately unclear whether the driver survived the incident.
The activists were returning home from a rally of the Liberal Democratic Party in a nearby town, said a regional spokesman for the party, known for its easy-to-digest far-right rhetoric.
Pskov Region will hold 19 elections of municipal heads and district legislators on Sunday as part of a nationwide election day that will see more than 7,000 votes in 80 of 83 Russian regions, according to the Central Election Commission.
(The article was rewritten, the headline was changed and figures for casualties were updated to reflect new information about the incident.)
