WARSAW, Poland, Aug. 8 (UPI) -- Three tourists were killed and 27 injured Wednesday when a Polish bus on its way to Ireland crashed in heavy rain in northeastern France, Polish Radio said.
The bus carrying as many as 50 passengers from the central Polish towns of Lodz and Poznan crashed before dawn when a driver tried to exit a highway for a parking lot at the northeastern French town of Dunkirk, close to the border with Belgium, the report said.
Eugeniusz Kowalski, Polish consul in the French town of Lille, south of Dunkirk, said 16 injured passengers were hospitalized in Dunkirk and 11 others in the Belgian towns of Ostend and Furnes.
Kowalski said preliminary reports suggested bad weather and poor visibility were to blame for the crash.
Marek Paszt, director of the Polonia Transport company, told a Polish television station the bus involved in the crash was a new one, less than a year old.
Last month, 27 Polish Roman Catholic pilgrims died in a bus crash at Grenoble in southeastern France when their bus skidded on an Alpine road and plunged into a ravine.
