Belgium Mourns as Bus Crash Victims Flown Home
Belgians observed a minute of silence and church bells tolled across the grieving nation Friday as the bodies of 22 children and six adults killed in a Swiss bus crash were flown home.
In Heverlee and Lommel, the hometowns of the victims, children, parents and teachers assembled in the courtyards of their primary schools. The children released white balloons as some adults were seen sobbing in Heverlee.
The country paused as two planes carrying the remains landed at an air base near Brussels, a day after the parents undertook the tragic task of identifying their children in Switzerland and visited the site of Tuesday night's accident.
Swiss authorities held an honor ceremony earlier, with blue uniformed officers marching onto the tarmac of the airport, not far from the crash location, as the bodies were loaded into two C-130 military planes.
Eight of the 24 children injured in the horrific accident returned home overnight, landing at Melsbroek military airport near Brussels before boarding buses and cars with relieved loved ones accompanied by a police escort.
With flags flying at half-mast, Belgians held a minute of silence at 11:00 am (10:00 GMT) followed by church bells ringing in remembrance of the young victims whose deaths shocked the nation.
Broadcasters went quiet while drivers of buses, metros and trains switched off their engines for a minute as the nation copes with an outpouring of grief.
"The whole country weeps for its children," Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo told parliament on Thursday.
The victims include 22 Belgian nationals and six Dutch children. One of the children, 11-year-old Sebastian Bowles, has dual British-Belgian nationality, British officials told Agence France Presse.
The children, who went to Catholic schools in the central Belgium town of Heverlee and the community of Lommel near the Dutch border, had spent a week-long ski trip in the Swiss alpine retreat of Val d'Anniviers.
Flowers, teddy bears and notes have been left by well-wishers at the gates of their two schools.
Some 2,500 people held an emotional evening vigil on Thursday in Lommel as classmates and neighbors turned out to pray for the dead during a Catholic service.
"With this candle, I am thinking of you," a church worker said for each of the 24 names read out in the tight-knit town of 33,000.
The toll at the 't Stekske primary school of around 200 children, whose name means "the little matchstick" in Dutch, was particularly high, apparently because this group was seated at the front of the bus when it smashed into the tunnel wall.
"This is a small town where nothing ever happens and everybody knows everybody else," said 51-year-old local Peter Flament.
Back in Switzerland, investigators sought to unravel the cause of the tragedy, with news reports saying the bus driver had tried to play a DVD shortly before the crash, suggesting a "moment of distraction" may be to blame.
This claim was rejected by the man's employer and dismissed as speculation by Swiss police.
Forty-six children and four teachers from two Belgian schools were returning home from a skiing holiday late Tuesday when their coach slammed into a concrete wall in the motorway tunnel in southern Switzerland.
Family members laid flowers at the crash site on Thursday after visiting the bodies at the morgue.
Three of the injured children remained in critical condition, a Swiss hospital spokeswoman said Thursday, and could not be moved.
The body of the driver was also expected to remain as "health analyses have to be carried out" to check if he was suffering from an illness that could have caused the accident.
After police said they did not believe the driver had been speeding, Swiss authorities said there would be a rethink about safety designs in the 2.5-kilometer tunnel.
It is believed that the coach clipped a kerb before it slammed into the wall of a rectangular emergency stop area.
A 100 kilometer per hour speed limit was also questioned by the press.
Source: Agence France Presse
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