A Russian-registered bus carrying Russian seafarers ran off a highway in northern Norway and overturned just before the weekend, leaving one person dead and 22 injured, five of them seriously.
The accident occurred in the dark, early morning hours of Friday on the E6 highway in Finnmark, in a mountainous area about a kilometer from Skaidi, roughly an hour’s drive from Hammerfest.
Three of those rushed to hospital in Hammerfest remained in intensive care over the weekend. The local hospital went into full catastrophe mode after the accident, calling in additional staff to treat the injured. Police said the 16 others hurt in the accident proved to have relatively minor injuries, however, and the hospital had reverted to normal operations by Saturday.
Two other passengers on the bus, though, were sent to the University Hospital for Northern Norway in Tromsø, where one person was said to be in critical condition and the other stable on Saturday. Among them was the driver of the bus, who police were waiting to question.
All of those on board the bus were Russian citizens whom police said were on their way to Hammerfest to take over as crew members on a Russian fishing trawler.
Police couldn’t say what caused the bus to overturn. “Our patrols who were at the site have reported that the roads were slippery, but we can’t confirm that was the cause of the accident,” a police spokesman told newspaper Aftenposten.
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