Mexico : A cargo truck jammed with people who appeared to be Central American migrants rolled over and crashed into a pedestrian bridge over a highway in southern Mexico on Thursday, killing at least 53 people and injuring dozens more.
The federal Attorney General’s Office said the preliminary estimate lists 53 dead, with three of the injured in critical condition, reports AP.
Luis Manuel Moreno, the head of the Chiapas state civil defence office, said about 21 of the injured had serious wounds and were taken to local hospitals.
The crash occurred on a highway leading toward the Chiapas state capital. Photos from the scene showed victims strewn across the pavement and inside the truck’s freight compartment.
The victims appeared to be immigrants from Central America, though their nationalities had not yet been confirmed. Moreno reported that some of the survivors said they were from the neighbouring country of Guatemala.
Mass deaths of migrants are something that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been desperate to avoid, even as his administration has accepted requests from the U.S. government to stem the flow of migrants moving north. “It is very painful,” he wrote on his Twitter account.
It was one of the worst single-day death tolls for migrants in Mexico since the 2010 massacre of 72 migrants by the Zetas drug cartel in the northern state of Tamaulipas.
