Six people were killed yesterday in two separate motor accidents in the North. Four people, three of them Italian tourists, died at the Newry bypass on the main Belfast to Dublin road and two more outside Ballymena, Co Antrim.
Both cars involved in the Newry accident burst into flames in what police believe was a head-on-collision, with one vehicle travelling North and the other South, at around 4.30 a.m. A fourth Italian, aged 22, who survived the accident, was taken to the Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry with serious injuries.
The bodies of the dead remained in the wreckage for several hours after the crash and the road was sealed off.
A spokesman for the Northern Ireland Fire Service said luggage had been strewn across the road. The names of the dead had not been released last night. Two men were killed in Co Antrim after a policeman's car collided with a car being driven by a 21-year-old man. An RUC spokesman named the policeman as Constable Robert Taylor (30), from Ballyclare, and said he was off duty at the time of the crash.
He was married with two children and captained the RUC rugby team. The second fatality was Mr Colin McNeilly, from Broughshane, who was single and lived with his parents. Two other cars collided at the scene of the accident. Their drivers escaped injury but suffered shock. When two people, a man and his 15-month-old son, killed on Saturday are taken into account, eight have died on the roads in the North within 48 hours.
The death toll for the year so far is 117 - compared with 141 for the whole of last year.