Bus carrying Ukrainian students overturns in France, killing 4

Four people were killed and nine others seriously injured on Friday in a motorway accident in western France involving a bus carrying a group of Ukrainians, authorities said.

The four people who died were adults and the bus was the only vehicle involved in the accident, local state official Emmanuel Aubry said.

It was not immediately clear if the adults killed in the Sarthe region — about 230 kilometres (140 miles) south-west of Paris, were Ukrainian.

The group included teenagers aged 15 to 17 travelling back to Ukraine after a school exchange trip, the Ukrainian embassy in France said.

The accident was “very, very sudden,” said Ukraine’s ambassador to France, Vadym Omelchenko, after speaking with passengers.

“We are in contact with the families of the victims. Some children have managed to reach their parents,” said the embassy.

Eighteen others sustained minor injuries when the bus overturned on the motorway outside the town of Degre, French Labour and Economy Minister Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet said during a press conference in the Sarthe region.

French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou said he was “thinking of the victims of the terrible bus accident that occurred in Sarthe”.

“We will do whatever is necessary to shed light on the circumstances of this accident,” he added.