EMERCOM jet takes 5 Russians affected by road accident in Belgium

A second jet dispatched by the Ministry for Emergency Situations and Civil Defense /EMERCOM/ to Belgium to pick up the Russians, who were injured in Sunday’s bus crash near Antwerp, landed at 02:15 Moscow Daylight Time Tuesday at the international airport of the southern city of Volgograd. The five persons evacuated from Belgium were the teenage tourists who received severe injuries in the crash. Before heading for Volgograd, the same Ilyushin-76 jet made a landing in Moscow to deliver a 17-year-old school student Galina Studenikina to a major Russian hospital. Apart from the five injured persons, the jet evacuated two other teenagers who were accompanying their injured relatives, an EMERCOM spokesman said. Galina Studenikina’s mother is expected to go to Moscow on the same Ilyushin-76 when it makes a return flight from Volgograd. While in the air, the injured adolescents were kept in specialized medical modules, with medics from the Centrospas emergency medicine division - surgeons, intensive care physicians and psychologists - giving them all the necessary assistance. Monday morning, EMERCOM’s Yakovlev-42 jet brought 29 persons to Volgograd. They had either gone through the accident unharmed or had received light injuries. A total of fifteen people were taken by bus right from their airport to their native township of Surovikino and another 14 stayed back in Volgograd for taking courses of treatment or detailed medical examination at local clinics. This means that all the Russians who were trapped by the bus crash on a major European motorway 10 km away from Antwerp early morning Sunday have left Belgium by now. The bus that had Polish drivers was carrying a group of 31 school children from the Volgograd region and nine accompanying adults broke through the sideway fencing at an elevated section of the road and plummeted down the slope into a ditch, killing both drivers, a tour guide from St Petersburg, a teacher form the Volgograd region, and an adolescent school student. As many as nineteen people were injured and thirteen of them received light injuries.