At least 26 people were killed and 24 injured when a coach transporting Polish pilgrims plunged off a bridge and burst into flames on a riverbank in the French Alps yesterday.

French police said that the vehicle missed a sharp bend in the road at the end of a notoriously dangerous descent near Grenoble in south east France. The coach crashed through the roadside wall, tumbled down a 40-metre (130ft) ravine and caught fire by the edge of the Romanche River at Notre-Dame-de-Mésage.

Officials said that a brake failure was the most likely cause, although they added that the driver may also have been going too fast. Witnesses saw the coach career out of control at high speed with black smoke billowing from its wheels.

“I heard the coach bounce three times,” said Christiane Bonnard, who lives in the nearby village of Vizille. “I went to see what had happened and I discovered four women in a panic and a bit of a foot all on its own. There were people lying around all over the place, unconscious. Some had been thrown out of the flaming coach.”

Locals tried to extinguish the blaze with buckets of river water before being ordered back by fire officers, who feared an explosion. Gendarmes said that the coach was carrying 47 pilgrims — including three priests — along with two drivers and a guide on a tour of European shrines.

The pilgrims, from the Szczecin region in north east Poland, were returning on the N85 road after visiting the Notre-Dame de la Salette shrine, where the Virgin Mary is believed to have appeared to two children in 1846.

Most of the victims died in the fire, which transformed the vehicle into a blackened mass of metal. But some were thrown along the riverbank, several metres clear of the coach. Divers searched the stream for bodies.

“We found one body in the river,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Bernard Suchet, of the fire brigade. Nine of the bodies were so badly burnt that police said they would be able to identify them only through DNA tests. A total of 14 people were flown by helicopter to hospitals in Grenoble suffering from serious injuries. Ten more were treated at the scene for minor wounds.

Slawomir Zyga, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Church in Szczecin, said that one of the priests on board the coach had telephoned the parish after the accident. “He said he was shaken up and bloody, but alive. We have no information on the other two priests.”

President Kaczynski of Poland was due in Grenoble last night to visit survivors in hospital. His French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, was planning to greet him at the city’s airport. “In this ordeal, you can count upon the solidarity of the French people,” Mr Sarkozy said.

Notre-Dame-de-Mésage, which lies on a 90-degree bend at the bottom of a long, winding descent with a 14 per cent gradient at its steepest point, was the scene of three coach crashes in the 1970s, killing a total of 77 people. In 1973, 43 Belgian sightseers died when their coach left the road at almost exactly the same spot as the Polish vehicle yesterday.

Jean-Jacques Defaite, the Mayor of nearby Laffrey, described the road as a “slide”. He added: “I don’t know how to make it safer. There’s nothing for vehicles which lose control, no slip road.” Coaches and lorries are now banned from the N85 — known as La Route Napoléon — unless they possess an electronic braking system.

Fire officers said that the Polish coach appeared to have no such system. A spokesman for the gendarmerie said: “Witnesses noticed that the coach’s brakes were not working properly and they saw an unusual black smoke.” Inspectors said that the coach appeared to have descended from the shrine at excessive speed. An inquiry will attempt to determine whether the speed was due to brake failure, or whether the brakes failed because the coach was going too fast.

Marcin Szklarski, chairman of Orlando Travel, the Polish company that organised the trip, said that the Skania 2000 coach had passed its checks in Germany three weeks ago. But a Polish road safety inspector, Alvin Gajadhur, said that 5 per cent of Polish coaches were in such bad condition they were prevented from taking the road.

77 dead in 5 years

September 7, 1970
Five blind French pilgrims killed after visiting Notre-Dame de la Salette when their coach smashes into a wall

July 18, 1973
43 Belgian sightseers killed when their coach crashes at 65mph (105km/h) on the same bend as the Polish vehicle. The speed limit is 25mph

April 2, 1975
29 French pilgrims killed in accident at 75mph after visiting the shrine

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