A car carrying eight teenagers struck road-maintenance vehicles on a country road in the Wetterau district of Hesse. Two of them were killed. Police say the person driving was fifteen years old.
The Hesse public broadcaster hessenschau reports that the crash happened on a Wednesday at about a quarter past one in the afternoon, on the Landesstraße 3185 near Nidda, on the stretch between the town's Ober-Schmitten and Michelnau districts. According to what police have established so far, the car was heading towards Gelnhaar and, for reasons not yet known, drifted left out of its lane.
The two who died were the fifteen-year-old who had been driving and a fourteen-year-old passenger. Police said the other six were all between fourteen and fifteen. Der Spiegel, Der Tagesspiegel and t-online report that the six were seriously injured; hessenschau puts it as injured in part seriously. They were taken to several hospitals in the area, and t-online, citing police, said they were still being treated there.
hessenschau identifies the car as a Mazda CX-5 and notes that the model is built to carry five. t-online says the same about capacity without naming the model; Der Spiegel calls it a Mazda SUV. Eight were in it.
The sequence, as police describe it, began with a works trailer that had been left standing on the road for line-marking. Der Spiegel reports that the lorry brought in for the marking work was parked in front of a traffic island with the trailer ahead of it. The impact pushed the trailer into the lorry behind it; Der Tagesspiegel and t-online add a third stage, the lorry then being shoved towards a marking vehicle behind that. hessenschau says the lorry had been parked with three workers at the junction with the K 199, and reports that on the evidence so far the car appears to have hit the trailer without braking.
Two of the three workers in the lorry's cab were hurt and taken to hospital. hessenschau gives their ages and injuries together: a man of 53 seriously hurt, a 57-year-old colleague with light injuries. t-online counts three injured workers, including a man of 28.
Several rescue helicopters were sent to treat and move the injured, according to Der Tagesspiegel; a police spokesman told t-online the same. hessenschau puts about a hundred emergency workers and police at the scene, with several vehicles and helicopters. The road was closed in both directions while the site was cleared, and t-online says it stayed shut for several hours.
Police have since released further details about the victims and how the collision unfolded. How the teenagers came to have the car is part of the investigation — a question Der Spiegel notes was still open in the hours after the crash. Der Tagesspiegel reports that prosecutors have appointed an expert to establish exactly what happened; t-online says that expert will reconstruct the sequence. The investigation continues.
Why it is on the board
Top of Der Spiegel's most-read ranking when we collected.
확인: Der Spiegel · Der Tagesspiegel · t-online · hessenschau