At least 24 people were killed and 24 others injured when a bus carrying mourners home from a funeral collided with a truck on the highway linking Nairobi with the coastal city of Mombasa, in southeastern Kenya.
The crash happened at about 7.45 a.m. local time on Sunday in the Kanga area near Mtito Andei, Al Jazeera reported. The death toll is attributed to police and the injury figure to hospital officials.
The bus belonged to Power of the Word Church International, based in Mombasa, and was carrying passengers back from their pastor’s funeral in western Kenya. The other vehicle was a truck transporting cement.
What investigators say happened
Makueni County Commissioner Abdullahi Khalif said the bus driver had been attempting to overtake several vehicles when the bus met the oncoming truck.
One survivor said the group had stopped for breakfast shortly before the collision, according to Hiru News, which filed on the crash at 5.14 p.m. Colombo time on Monday and credited Al Jazeera.
The photograph above, from the scene, shows the wreck carrying the church’s livery and roundel, with the roof and upper panels torn away along the rear two-thirds of the vehicle.
The government response
Transport Minister Davis Chirchir said: “We cannot continue treating road safety as business as usual,” calling for stronger measures to bring down road deaths.
President William Ruto offered condolences to the families and ordered inspections of public service vehicles.
The pressure is recent and specific. On 3 October — just over three weeks earlier — a multi-vehicle crash near Salama on the same highway killed 17 people, most of them Catholic pilgrims. This desk did not report that earlier crash.
The cause cited here, an overtaking manoeuvre into oncoming traffic, is the same one police gave for Monday’s tipper-and-bus collision at Ahangama on Sri Lanka’s southern coast.
Not reported
Neither filing gives the number of people aboard the bus, so how many escaped unhurt is unknown. Neither names the pastor whose funeral the group was returning from, identifies any of the dead, or says whether the truck driver was among the casualties. No filing states whether anyone has been arrested or charged.
On the two figures: the dead and the injured are both reported as 24. They are separate counts from separate authorities — police for the first, hospital officials for the second — and the repetition is recorded here so it is not later mistaken for a single number applied twice.
On the toll: several Kenyan outlets, including The Star and Pulse, first reported 22 dead on Sunday before the figure rose to 24, and Pulse carried a survivor’s claim that the driver had been drowsy. None of those outlets is a verified newsroom for this desk, so the claim is named here rather than relied on. Al Jazeera’s “at least 24” is the figure used above.
