March 14 | 
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Catholic pupils among dead in bus crash in Switzerland
At least 28 people, including 22 schoolchildren, were killed last night when a coach bringing Belgian and Dutch tourists back to Belgium from a skiing holiday crashed into the wall of a tunnel in Switzerland near the border with Italy.
The bus, transporting 52 people, mostly children aged about 12, from the towns of Lommel and Heverlee in Belgium’s Dutch-speaking Flanders region, crashed in Valais at 9.15 pm.
Six adults, including the two drivers of the coach, died in the accident.
Children at St Lambertus school in Heverlee, a suburb of Leuven, were informed about the accident at an assembly before classes this morning. Flowers were laid outside the Catholic school where eight children were unaccounted for.
“The eight sets of parents, they can only sit and wait, they just don’t know. I’m in pain, I have tears inside,” Fr Dirk De Gendt, a local priest who is on the school board, said.
Distraught parents, many of whom still did not know if their children were among the deceased, gathered at a school in Belgium to be flown to Switzerland on military aircraft.
In addition to the fatalities, another 24 children were injured in the crash, which has been described as one the worst traffic accidents in Swiss history.
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