After the serious bus accident on Autobahn 9 near Leipzig, the police have announced the identities of three of the four fatalities. A 47-year-old Polish woman, a 20-year-old Indonesian woman living in Berlin and a 19-year-old from Bavaria died in the accident, the police announced on Thursday. Another woman who died at the scene of the accident has not yet been positively identified. A person who was initially reported to the police as having died was in a life-threatening condition, the Leipzig Police Department announced on Wednesday evening. The traffic police inspectorate is conducting an investigation on suspicion of negligent homicide, it said.
A double-decker bus from Flixbus came off the road on the A9 on Wednesday morning and overturned. The police initially spoke of five dead and 20 injured. The evening’s announcement said there were six seriously injured and 29 slightly injured. According to the police, most of the 53 bus passengers did not come from Germany. Of the 54 passengers, 18 have German citizenship. The rest came from more than 20 countries, including Peru, New Zealand, China, Canada and the USA.
Investigations against the bus driver
The public prosecutor’s office is now investigating the 62-year-old bus driver for negligent homicide and negligent bodily harm, as a spokesman for the authority said on Thursday. The spokesman could not say whether the man had already been questioned. Investigating the causes is now the focus of the investigators. All injured people who are being treated in a hospital should also be questioned if their health permits it, as a spokeswoman for the Leipzig Police Department said on Thursday when asked. According to the public prosecutor’s office, an accident analysis report on the bus will also be commissioned. The authority spokesman emphasized that the first results could only be expected in a few weeks.
The coach had an accident on the way from Berlin to Zurich. It started at 8 a.m. and the accident happened at around 9:45 a.m. between the Wiedemar junction and the Schkeuditzer Kreuz. According to initial findings, no other vehicle was probably involved. According to the bus company, the driver of the bus is said to have adhered to all driving and rest times. “There were two drivers on board, the driver on duty had been driving the bus since it left Berlin at 8 a.m.,” it said. The A9, an important north-south route between Berlin and Munich, was closed around the accident site for twelve hours.
Before the emergency services arrived, a bus following had stopped at the scene of the accident. According to the Saarbrücken newspaper There were numerous firefighters from Saarbrücken who immediately rushed to the crashed coach. Accordingly, they had pulled the injured out of the rubble and treated them without professional equipment.
Emergency vehicles and rescue helicopters are on the A9 at the scene of the accident.
(Photo: Jan Woitas/dpa)
The provider Flixbus was seriously affected after the accident. “Our thoughts are with everyone affected by this accident and their families,” said a company spokesman. They are working closely with the local authorities and the rescue workers on site and are doing everything they can to clarify the cause of the accident quickly and completely.
Saxony’s Interior Minister Armin Schuster (CDU) expressed his condolences to the relatives of the dead. In addition, “I hope that the injured get better quickly.” Schuster thanked the rescue workers for their professional efforts. He saw in the firefighters’ faces “how difficult these scenes were.”
Modern long-distance buses have good safety precautions
The accident raises safety questions, even though Johannes Hübner, safety expert at the International Bus Tourism Association (RDA), emphasizes that the accident near Leipzig was the first serious long-distance bus accident in 2024. Statistics from the RDA show that coaches have become even safer as a means of transport since the corona pandemic, said Hübner.
This is also due to the fact that the safety precautions on coaches have recently been significantly increased. After all new buses were equipped with lane keeping mechanisms a good five years ago, this year they also have emergency braking assistants. There are also cameras that are intended to give drivers a better view of the traffic. Since the bus involved in the accident was a new model, it can be assumed that it was equipped with the necessary technical aids.
Why the accident nevertheless occurred remains to be clarified. According to Hübner, further improvement in safety is definitely possible, for example by raising awareness about wearing the lap belt. As Hübner says, the bus drivers, especially in new buses from the provider Flixbus, are obliged to play a video after every stop that informs guests about buckling up. In practice, however, such instruction often does not take place.
Aside from safety on and in the bus, the RDA expert would like the focus to be on a larger road safety problem. He blames, among other things, the unsecured lowering of the road for the severity of the accident at the Wiedemar motorway junction. “When I look at the pictures, it is a fatal accident scene where there is an embankment on the right and no guardrail,” said Hübner. As soon as a bus leaves the road, an accident is difficult to prevent due to the height of the vehicle.
There was already a serious bus accident on the A 9 near Bad Dürrenberg in Saxony-Anhalt in 2019. A woman died and several people were injured. In December 2023, a coach also had an accident on the A 9 near Leipzig, leaving several people injured.