More than 20 feared dead in Thai school bus inferno

BANGKOK — Rescuers pulled children's bodies from the charred wreckage of a Thai school bus on Tuesday after an accident turned the vehicle into an inferno, with more than 20 feared dead.

A devastating blaze tore through the coach on a highway in a northern Bangkok suburb as it carried 38 children, ranging from kindergarten age to young teenagers and six teachers on a school trip.

The victims' bodies were so badly burned that officials say it is not yet possible to confirm the death toll, with DNA testing needed to identify remains.

Interior Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said 21 people escaped from the blaze but 23 are still unaccounted for and likely to be dead.

Rescue workers put up screens around the wreckage to shield firefighters and investigators as they recovered bodies from the blackened shell of the bus.

"Some of the bodies we rescued were very, very small. They must have been very young in age," Piyalak Thinkaew, who led the search, told reporters at the scene, adding that the fire started at the front of the bus.

"The kids' instinct was to escape to the back so the bodies were there," he said.

Police are hunting the coach driver after he fled the scene, acting national police chief Kitrat Phanphet told reporters.

"The driver is on the run, we will not wait for him to turn himself in, we will send a team to find him," Kitrat said.

Some of the children who survived suffered horrific burns to their faces, mouths and eyes, doctors treating them told local media.

The bus was one of three carrying children from Wat Khao Phraya Sangkharam school in the northern province of Uthai Thani on a field trip to a science museum in northern Bangkok.

A video posted on the school's Facebook page just hours before the tragedy shows the group of youngsters in orange uniform shirts stopping off at the ancient Thai capital of Ayutthaya.

The disaster is believed to have begun when one of the bus tyres burst on the highway around 12:30 pm (05:30 GMT), sending it crashing into a barrier and triggering the inferno, officials said. 

Video footage from the scene showed flames engulfing the bus as it burned under an overpass, huge clouds of dense black smoke billowing into the sky.

Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra visited survivors in hospital and said the government would pay for medical treatment and compensate the victims' families. 

"As a mother, I would like to express my deepest condolences to the families of the injured and deceased," she wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Meechai Sa-ard, a motorbike taxi driver, heard the noise of the incident from a kilometre away. 

"There was smoke everywhere. Poor children, I heard they were very little," he told AFP.

"I was hoping that god would be kind so that the rain could put the fire out and the kids would survive."

Thailand has one of the worst road safety records in the world, with unsafe vehicles and poor driving contributing to the high annual death toll.

Around 20,000 people are killed every year on the kingdom's roads, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), more than 50 a day on average.

In March 2018, a similar bus fire killed 20 Myanmar migrant workers, while four years earlier at least 30 people perished when a bus careered off a mountain road into a ravine.

The economic losses caused by traffic deaths and injuries amounted to around $15.5 billion in 2022, more than three percent of GDP, the WHO says.