BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- A bus packed with children and their parents on their way home from a skiing holiday collided with a truck early today, killing 24 people and injuring 23, police said.
The collision occurred before dawn near Doljevac on the Belgrade-Skopje road about 150 miles southeast of Belgrade.
'The sight was horrifying,' said Svetomir Lalovic, the Serbia Republic interior minister who visited the crash site.
'It was hard to stand the sight of dead mothers and their children, and pregnant women, crushed in the twisted wreckage of the bus.'
Police said the travel agency bus was taking vacationers home from a skiing holiday in the Krusevo region when it hit a truck. Police said 24 people were killed and 23 injured.
Unconfirmed reports said the truck had Danish licence plates and that its driver, a foreigner, was among those injured.
The injured were taken to the university hospital at the nearby city of Nis. None were on the danger list, officials said.
The road, which leads to southeast Yugoslavia and Greece, was closed temporarily while court judges and police from Nis investigated the collision.
