Eight German children died and 23 were injured when their double-decker coach, bound for a youth camp in Hungary, crashed in Austria yesterday, the Austrian fire brigade said.
The bus was carrying 61 passengers on holiday to Lake Balaton when it collided with a truck on the Vienna-Salzburg motorway near the town of Pochlarn, about 80 km west of the capital.
The fire brigade at nearby Melk said 11 boys and 50 girls from the southern German cities of Stuttgart, Munich, Karlsruhe and Freiburg had been aboard the coach.
Two drivers were on the coach, the tour operator RUF Jugen dreise said from Germany.
Austrian state television said emergency services had retrieved the bodies of four boys and four girls, and that one girl remained in a critical condition.
German police said the coach, which was travelling toward Vienna, came from Harsewinkel near Gutersloh and was one of two taking 125 people to Hungary.
The German Youth Hostel Association, which arranged the trip for two of the holidaymakers, said the children were aged between 14 and 17 years and had started their journey on Sunday from Freiburg.
The bus was lying on the right side of the road with its top deck badly crumpled, its back window completely ripped out and its white paintwork and grey seats streaked with dried blood.
"The worst thing for us all is the sight of the dead children, some of whom are severely mutilated," said Mr Albert Reiter, a paramedic.
The motorway links Germany to the Austrian capital Vienna. The stretch by Pochlarn is undergoing heavy roadworks with west- and east-bound traffic squeezed together with no central reservation in between.
Emergency services at the scene said it appeared that the Salzburg-bound truck had been driving too fast and lost control.
"It seems . . . the truck skidded when it reached the transition to oncoming traffic and its trailer toppled over. At the same time, a bus and another truck came towards it and collided with the trailer," said Mr Engelbert Strasser of the motorway police.
The accident, which happened at around 3.30 a.m. (2.30 a.m. Irish time), completely blocked the key east-west route, causing lengthy traffic jams in the northeast of the country.
Meanwhile, about 35 people were injured yesterday when two passenger trains collided near Linz, in north-east Austria, national radio said. The trains crashed at Traun, about 100 km west of Vienna.
The Austrian agency APA reported at least 15 people had been injured in the accident.
Several serious accidents have already occurred in similar circumstances in Austria.
An incident on the same motorway in June left six people dead, and three Germans were killed last September when their car collided with a Hungarian bus. Austria has one of the highest tolls for road accident deaths in Europe. Each year on average 132 people per one million are killed on the road in Austria, compared to 94 in Germany and 60 in Britain. Fifteen people were killed on Austrian roads over last weekend alone.