Horror: 52 People Burn To Death Inside Bus After Vehicle Went Up In Flames (Photo)

Posted by Samuel on Thu 18th Jan, 2018 - tori.ng

In what will come across as a really traumatizing development, about 52 persons have perished after their bus went up in flames.

Bus fire: The bus in Kazakhstan in which 52 people died

No less than fifty-two people have been tragically killed on Thursday in a gruesome bus fire in Kazakhstan.

According to the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, the bus they were travelling on caught fire and spread quickly. Only five of the 57 people on board managed to survive, the central Asian nation’s emergency services ministry said in a statement.

“On January 18 at 10:30 am (0430 GMT), a bus caught fire … 55 passengers and two drivers were on board. Five people who managed to escape are receiving medical assistance. The rest died on the spot,” the ministry said, without elaborating on the cause of the blaze.

Speaking with AFP, the emergency services ministry official Ruslan Imankulov revealed that the bus driver said the passengers were Uzbek nationals while the vehicle was registered in Kazakhstan.

He said the fire spread through the bus extremely quickly.

Video broadcast by Russian and Kazakh media showed black smoke and flames billowing from the vehicle on a flat stretch of road carving through a snowy steppe. A photograph taken later showed the vehicle completely charred.

The ministry named the vehicle as a Hungarian-made Ikarus. These buses are still widely used in ex-Soviet nations, even though they are often decades old.

The bus was headed from the Russian city of Samara on the Volga river to the town of Shymkent in southern Kazakhstan, the ministry said.

The tragedy, which struck in the area around the city of Aktobe, came less than three years after 16 people, including three children, died in the country when a minibus collided with a van on April 20, 2015.