PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- Two babies were killed when a river surging with rain from Tropical Storm Fay toppled an overcrowded bus, a U.N. official said Monday, denying reports that at least 30 passengers were feared dead.
U.N. peacekeepers who went to the scene of Sunday's accident confirmed that 41 people made it out safely, said Fred Blaise, a spokesman for the United Nations police force in the troubled Caribbean nation.
Blaise told The Associated Press that the peacekeepers saw the bodies of the two infants, killed as the bus tried to cross the swollen Riviere Glace, as well as that of a man who drowned in the same river but was not on the bus.
Silvera Guillaume, coordinator for Haiti's civil protection department in the area, had said earlier that 23 people escaped from the bus and at least 30 more were missing and feared dead. Guillaume was traveling to the remote site on Haiti's southern peninsula Monday.
Witnesses said at least two other buses crossed the river safely just before the third flipped. David Pierre, one of three mayors of Beaumont, the town where the incident happened, told Radio Metropole that officials have been trying to get a bridge built in the area for years because of flooding.
Fay, the sixth storm of the 2008 Atlantic season, spared Cuba on Monday and moved into the Florida Straits, as rain and wind gusts began to lash at South Florida
- 768 reads
