Paralympics Scrap Closing Celebrations After Crash
World - Reuters
Mon Sep 27,11:24 AM ET !
By Karolos Grohmann
ATHENS (Reuters) - The Athens Paralympics canceled celebrations at its closing ceremony after seven schoolchildren traveling to watch the event died in a bus crash on Monday.
The school bus, on its way to Athens from central Greece, collided with a truck. Thirty people were injured, 26 of them pupils in their mid-teens, police said. Of 41 people on the bus, only four escaped unscathed.
"The Paralympics Organizing Committee announces the cancellation of celebrations at the closing ceremony (on Tuesday) ... due to the tragic accident," a statement said.
Organizers had planned a visually stunning celebration for the end of the Games, in which disabled athletes compete.
Instead they will go ahead with just a brief athletes' parade, a speech by the International Paralympic Committee chief and the handing over of the flag to Beijing, host of the 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
A minute's silence was observed on Monday at all sports venues in remembrance of the victims.
Thousands of Greek children on school trips have come to Athens to watch the Paralympics, which started two weeks after the end of the Athens 2004 Games and have involved more than 4,000 disabled athletes from 140 nations. The event is held every four years at the same venue as the Olympics.
Some athletes taking part in the Paralympics are themselves victims of road accidents.
Rescue workers blocked traffic on the country's main north-south highway after the bus coming from the town of Trikala crashed at Kammena Vourla, some 110 miles north of Athens.
They pulled out the dead and injured from the mangled bus as others cleaned pools of blood and oil from the road.
"The situation inside the bus was absolute horror, blood everywhere," a rescue worker told Reuters.
Hospital officials said two of the injured were in serious condition.
The government said all schools would be closed on Wednesday as a tribute to the dead and an investigation into the crash was under way.
Last year more than 80 people died and about 200 were injured in accidents in the same area, one of the most dangerous stretches of the highway.
The toll included the country's worst road accident in decades, in which 21 schoolchildren died when a truck carrying wooden planks crashed into a bus in northern Greece, decapitating most of them.
(Additional reporting by Yannis Behrakis in Kammena Vourla)
