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Fri, Mar

At Least 54 Migrants Killed In Horror Mexico Crash

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Up to 54 persons have lost their lives and scores injured after the truck they were being transported in crashed in southern Mexico, authorities say. More than 150 people, said to be migrants from Central America, were crammed into the truck’s trailer when it rolled, overturned on a dangerous curve outside the city of Tuxtla Gutierrez in the state of Chiapas. The migrants inside the cargo trailer were flipped, tossed and crushed into a pile that mingled the living and the dead. The crash, which is one of the worst road accidents in the country in recent years occurred on Thursday. According to authorities, the nationalities of the victims which include men, women and children, have not yet been confirmed, though locals said most of them on board were from Honduras and Guatemala. The truck was reportedly speeding when it flipped on a sharp bend and hit a pedestrian bridge on a main road leading to the Chiapas state capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez.

Chiapas, which neighbours Guatemala, is a major transit point for undocumented migrants.

Many of the injured struggled to extract themselves from the mass of bodies inside of the overturned container.

Volunteer rescuers hauled bodies off the pile by their arms and legs, while some migrants scrambled and limped to extract themselves from the twisted steel sheets of the collapsed container.

Images on news sites showed some people laid out on tarps on the ground for medical care. Images of the crash site also showed rows of what appeared to be bodies of the accident victims wrapped in white cloths.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing poverty and violence in Central America attempt to cross through Mexico each year in a bid to reach the US.

Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei wrote on Twitter: “I deeply regret the tragedy in Chiapas state, and I express my solidarity for the victims’ families, to whom we will offer all the necessary consular assistance, including repatriation.”

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