| Yesterday at 9.05, a few tens of meters from the Mamaika police checkpoint, located on the border of the Central and Lazarevsky districts of Sochi, a BOVA bus en route to the resort from Grozny crashed. There were 50 passengers and two drivers on the bus. The passengers - residents of Chechnya, adults and ten children - were sent for examination and treatment to the eye microsurgery center, which operates in the Metallurg sanatorium in Sochi. A 30-year-old woman and a 17-year-old boy died at the scene of the disaster. 19 people were hospitalized in Sochi hospitals, including four children aged six to 14 years old who were taken to the children's hospital. Doctors assess the condition of three children as satisfactory; one child, a six-year-old girl, is in serious condition. Among the injured adults, four were seriously injured. Investigators and experts from the Sochi police department and prosecutor's office worked at the scene of the disaster all Monday. According to their preliminary conclusions, the cause of the tragedy was the failure of the bus's braking system and erroneous actions of the driver. The 44-year-old driver Abaz Maguev realized that the bus’s brakes were not working on the crest of the Mamaysky Pass, when the car, quickly picking up speed, rolled down. In front of the bus was an escort car with two employees of a specialized company of the State Traffic Safety Inspectorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Chechnya. They immediately noticed that the bus went through the first turn of the descent without braking. The Chechen traffic cops did everything to prevent a catastrophe: they turned on the siren and loudspeaker, notified oncoming and passing traffic about the danger, led the broken down bus down the pass (about 3 km) to the Mamaika post, which has an emergency exit especially for such cases -- pocket with gravel-sand mixture. More than one car with brakes that failed on the descent has been saved in this pocket without any consequences. The escort car turned off the road towards a pocket, showing the way to the bus, but the bus driver missed and drove the car not into the pocket, but to the left, onto the road to the holiday village, which goes sharply upward. Having driven 80 meters along this road by inertia, the bus overturned onto its roof into a deep ditch. The last victim was evacuated by ambulance from the scene of the disaster half an hour later. Rescuers from the Sochi EMERCOM squad had to literally cut several passengers out of the mangled bus interior with hydraulic scissors. The 1979 bus, as it turned out, was registered in Ingushetia, belongs to a private individual and was chartered for one trip to Sochi specifically to deliver patients to the eye microsurgery center. Igor GLANIN, Sochi
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