Incident near northern city of Salta blamed on burst tyre, causing vehicle to fall 65ft into ravine

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

At least 43 police officers were killed when a bus in a convoy in northern Argentina blew a tyre and veered off the side of a bridge, falling at about 65ft in an accident that brought the poor state of the South American nation’s roads into focus.

The bus was one of three carrying police near Salta, a city about 900 miles north of Buenos Aires. The National Gendarmerie officers, a special police force typically charged with patrolling frontier regions, were on their way to Jujuy, a region in northern Argentina that borders Bolivia.

The security minister, Patricia Bullrich, who toured the scene, told reporters that an initial investigation found that the right tyre of the bus had ruptured. “This is a tragedy. We are going to work to make sure gendarmes are better equipped,” she said.

Local television images showed rescue crews working around the overturned bus, which authorities said was carrying around 60 people.

Roads in Argentina, a large country with a land mass about four times that of Texas, are poorly maintained in many rural areas.

The crash comes as President Mauricio Macri begins his first full week in office. He issued a statement offering condolences to the families of the victims. “It’s for this reason that we need to improve the roads so that this doesn’t keep happening,” the statement read.

Juan Manuel Urtubey, the governor of Salta, said that this accident wasn’t caused by the poor state of Route 34, which some locally call the “highway of death” due to its high number of accidents.

“There are problems, but not on that part of the road,” he said, adding that the tyre appeared to be the cause.

In 2012, a dozen gendarmes were killed in accident in the southern province of Chubut when their bus collided with a truck.