At least 25 people were killed and 17 injured when a tourist bus skidded off a road and plummeted 650 feet down a slope in Peru.
“The area is difficult to access for emergency services,” highway patrol chief Johnny Rolando Valderrama told AFP. The cause of the accident was not immediately clear.
Mayor Valderrama said the bus overturned and rolled down a slope around dawn, Reuters reported, lamenting that it was the first such accident to occur on the Los Libertadores highway in the Andes.
Police officials later told state news agency Andina that 42 passengers were on board the bus and that police had confirmed the whereabouts of all of them. Ground transport regulator SUTRAN later issued a statement identifying the owner of the bus as Turismo Molina Union SAC and opening an investigation into the company.
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A bus falls into a ravine on a rural road in the northern Andes in Peru's Ayacucho region on May 14, 2024. (Cynthia Carvajal/AFP via Getty Images)
According to AFP, there were more than 87,000 crashes in Peru, killing more than 3,000 people, and around 70% of the crashes were due to “human factors”.
In January, 25 people were killed and many more injured when a passenger bus plunged into a ravine in northern Peru. The bus, owned by Q'orianka Tours, had departed from the capital Lima and was travelling to the Tumbes region near Ecuador.
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The coast of Lima, Peru, June 20, 2024. (Mirko Torres Ramirez/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Peruvian prosecutors blamed the January incident on reckless driving and speeding, which they say are to blame for most bus accidents in the country. Another problem is a slow response to the incident, which creates confusion and leads to more deaths.
A bus crash in April in Peru's northern Cajamarca region, killing 25 people, was Peru's deadliest highway accident in the past two years, according to the Associated Press.
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A panoramic view of the ancient Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in the Urubamba Valley, north of the city of Cusco in the Andean mountains of Peru, on March 7, 2024. (Diego Radames/Anadolu via Getty Images)
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In September 2023, some 24 people were killed when a bus went off a mountain road and fell down a slope in the northwestern region of Ayacucho. In a more recent accident in May, 13 people were killed and 14 injured when a bus plunged down a cliff in Ayacucho.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Peter Aitken is a reporter for Fox News Digital specializing in national and world news.