{"id":6301,"date":"2023-08-06T20:10:35","date_gmt":"2023-08-06T15:10:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/?p=6301"},"modified":"2023-08-06T20:10:37","modified_gmt":"2023-08-06T15:10:37","slug":"morocco-minibus-plunge-kills-24","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/news\/morocco-minibus-plunge-kills-24\/","title":{"rendered":"Morocco minibus plunge kills 24"},"content":{"rendered":"

A minibus carrying market-goers in Morocco plunged into a ravine on Sunday, killing 24 people in one of the North African country’s worst-ever road accidents, officials said.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The passengers were travelling a mountainous route to a weekly market in the town of Demnate, in the central province of Azilal, when the minibus overturned on a bend, the local authorities said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Images on public broadcaster 2M showed the vehicle crushed at the bottom of the ravine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“All the passengers are dead,” Youssef Makhloufi, director of the Demnate hospital, told 2M, which reported that at least two women and a child were among the victims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Local authorities said an investigation has begun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Accidents are frequent on the roads of Morocco and other North African countries, which see thousands of road deaths annually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eleven people, mostly agricultural workers, died in March when their minibus slammed into a tree after the driver lost control in the rural town of Brachoua, local officials said at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many poorer citizens use coaches and minibuses to travel in rural areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In August last year, 23 people were killed and 36 injured when their bus overturned on a bend east of Morocco’s economic capital Casablanca.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An average of 3,500 road deaths and 12,000 injuries are recorded annually in Morocco, according to the National Road Safety Agency, with an average of 10 deaths per day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The figure last year was around 3,200.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Authorities have set out to halve the mortality rate by 2026 ever since the worst bus accident in the country’s history left 42 dead in 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In neighbouring Algeria, 34 people were killed on July 19 when a passenger bus collided head-on with a pickup truck carrying fuel cans and burst into flames, deep in the southern Sahara region, officials said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Algeria’s deadliest road crash in years also left 12 others injured, many with severe burns, Algeria’s civil defence agency said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of Tunisia’s worst road accidents occurred in 2019 when a bus plunged into a ravine, killing at least 24 Tunisians and injuring 18 others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Libya’s roads have ranked among the deadliest in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Libyan interior ministry’s traffic department recorded 4,115 road accidents across the country in 2018, with 2,500 people killed and more than 3,000 others injured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About 7,000 people lost their lives on the roads of Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, in 2020, according to official figures.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A minibus carrying market-goers in Morocco plunged into a ravine on Sunday, killing 24 people in one of the North African country’s worst-ever road accidents, officials said. The passengers were travelling a mountainous route to a weekly market in the town of Demnate, in the central province of Azilal, when the minibus overturned on a […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":6302,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6301"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6301\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}