Bus crash on Nairobi-Mombasa highway kills 22

At least 22 people were killed when a bus collided with a truck on Kenya's main Nairobi-Mombasa highway on Sunday morning, according to police. Around 24 injured were receiving treatment, most of them at Mtito Andei hospital near the crash site, where medical superintendent Paul Kisienya oversaw the arrivals. The passengers were returning to Mombasa after attending the funeral of their church pastor in western Kenya.

The crash came three weeks after another accident on the same highway killed 17 people, and occurred near the site of a previous fatal accident. Two crashes have now killed 39 people on one road in under a month. The National Transport Safety Authority said it suspected improper overtaking, based on information that the vehicles collided head-on. The passenger accounts point in a different direction: Spenza Mudave said a truck hit the bus from behind, causing it to roll. The authority says the circumstances remain unclear.

The bus had just left Mtito Andei town, where the passengers had eaten breakfast. Violet Mwandonyi, a mother of two, was on board. "I cannot recall what exactly happened," she said. "The last thing I remember is that we were all wailing and calling on motorists to come to our rescue." Her two children were also on the bus.

Speeding and poor road conditions have previously been cited as contributing factors in road accidents in Kenya. The highway is the country's main link between the capital and the coast, and the authority's preliminary finding assigns Sunday's deaths to how the vehicles were driven rather than to the road itself — a finding that rests on a head-on collision that at least one passenger describes differently.

Violet Mwandonyi survived the crash. She did not know what had happened to her two children, who were on the bus with her.