| 13 people died in a car accident near Kazan The biggest car accident in recent years occurred on Saturday morning in Tatarstan. On the Kazan-Ulyanovsk highway, a Gazelle minibus and a Volkswagen Passat moving towards each other collided at high speed. The terrible impact caused the cars to catch fire. As a result, out of 15 people, only two managed to escape.
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Tatarstan, a minibus heading to Kazan left the Ulyanovsk bus station at seven o’clock in the morning. 13 tickets were sold for the flight. The tragedy took place at approximately 9.05-9.10 on the 57th kilometer of the Kazan-Ulyanovsk highway in the Apastovsky district of Tatarstan, when most of the journey was already over. As the republic's traffic police said, the roads are usually empty at this hour, and the weather on Saturday was sunny and clear. According to preliminary data from the investigation, the minibus was moving in its own lane, going up the hill. Suddenly, a Volkswagen passenger car jumped into her lane from the oncoming lane. The foreign car, in which the driver and passenger were, literally flew into the left side of the minibus, crushing it inside the cabin. The body of the foreign car itself was torn apart by a strong blow. By the time firefighters and police arrived, 13 people, including two children aged five and eight, were already dead. The administration of the village of Apastovo, located not far from the crash site, says that the cause of death was not so much the impact itself as the fire and explosions that followed it. During the collision, the Volkswagen, which was torn in half, had a punctured gas tank, from which gasoline leaked and immediately ignited. The fire immediately spread to the bus, and a few seconds later the gas cylinders attached under the bottom of the Gazelle, the engine of which was adapted to run on compressed gas, exploded.
Of the cars engulfed in fire, only two minibus passengers managed to escape: Shamil Medvedev and Gyulfira Fezyukova. Both were sent to the Apastovsky regional hospital. Shamil Medvedev, whose wife and two children died in the fire, did not receive serious injuries and was sent home to Ulyanovsk, where local psychologists will take care of him - the man is in an acute state of shock after losing all his loved ones. And Gyulfira Fezyukova, with numerous burns and a fractured hip joint, was sent to the Republican Clinical Hospital in Kazan. Her condition is assessed as serious.
The traffic police believe that Medvedev and Fezyukova were thrown out of the car by the blast wave, which saved their lives. By the time the doctors arrived, both of them were lying unconscious not far from the flaming carcasses of the cars. For the remaining passengers of both cars, the blast wave turned out to be fatal - even if they survived the collision, they had no chance of getting out of the fire trap.
Now the investigation is establishing the causes of the accident - according to the preliminary version, the Volkswagen driver lost control at high speed, which, according to experts, was about 160-180 km/h. However, the main problem for investigators will be identifying the bodies of the dead. Visual identification is impossible - all the bodies were mutilated by fire beyond recognition. On Sunday afternoon, the administration of the Apastovsky district could speak with confidence about only two reliably identified victims of the disaster - the daughters of Shamil Medvedev (besides them, there were no children in the minibus). The bodies of the remaining victims are awaiting genetic testing. Yuri MATSARSKY |
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