Truck rams US Army vehicles in German motorway accident

BERLIN: A truck crashed into several US army vehicles, including two fuel tankers, that had pulled over to the side of a highway in southern Germany on Monday, setting off a blazing inferno and injuring several people, police and the US military said.

The driver of the truck was believed to have been killed, police said. Eight US soldiers were taken to the hospital for precautionary screening, the 7th Army Training Command said, but no U.S. personnel were reported otherwise injured.

A convoy of four US military vehicles from the Training Command had pulled over to the side of the motorway southeast of the Bavarian city of Nuremberg when an articulated truck struck them from behind.

The smash caused a multi-vehicle pileup and a blaze that engulfed several vehicles in flames and sent plumes of smoke into the sky, police said.

The truck was loaded with wood chips and caught on fire, Bild newspaper cited police as saying. Two of the US vehicles involved were tanker trucks but they did not explode, police said.

The police said several people were injured. Rescue crews had been unable to pull the driver of the truck out of the badly damaged cab but they did not believe he had survived.

Photographs from the scene showed the burnt-out wrecks of several vehicles by the foam-covered side of the road.

Police said they believed the crash had been an accident.

The US 7th Army Training Command’s Combined Arms Training Center, based in Grafenwoehr, was set up in 1948 following World War Two as part of the allied presence in Germany.