• Matatu driver unsuccessfully tried to avoid the speeding lorry.
• Trailer driver has gone into hiding.
Eleven people travelling in a 14-seater matatu died in a road crash on the Nairobi-Nakuru highway on Friday. No one survived.
The accident caused a traffic jam and disrupted business in Kikopey trading centre, as residents jammed the road to view the bodies, which were in a pool of blood.
Witnesses said a Nakuru-bound trailer rammed into the matatu. Paul Mwangi said the speeding truck was hooting and flashing its lights as it drove downhill.
He said the matatu driver unsuccessfully tried to avoid the speeding lorry.
“The truck rammed the matatu on its side, killing all the occupants on the spot before hitting five other vehicles and landing into a ditch,” Mwangi said.
The trailer driver fled. The police are trailing him. Fuel spilled at the scene. Some pedestrians suffered minor injuries.
Gilgil police boss Emmanuel Opuru said the driver of the trailer was to blame.
“The information we are getting is that the truck started swerving from one side of the road to the other before hitting the matatu and the other vehicles,” he said.
The bodies were taken to Gilgil Subcounty Hospital mortuary. The wreckage was towed to the Gilgil police station.
According to data by the National Transport and Safety Agency as of March 14, 630 people have perished in road accidents this year.
They include 235 pedestrians, 69 drivers, 190 passengers and 142 cyclists.
In the past two years, more than 30 people have died on the steep section of the road, with mechanical failures blamed for the accidents.
In 2017, a driver lost control of a trailer and rammed into a bus killing 20 people before another bus hit a lorry last year near the same area killing 18 people.
On February 24, four occupants of a saloon car perished in a grisly accident after the vehicle collided head-on with a bus at Moredant on the Nakuru-Nairobi highway. Another two people died on the Kisumu-Kakamega road after a truck driver lost control and rammed into a tuk-tuk. One person survived.
Zambian High Commissioner succumbed to his injuries on Monday after weeks in the Intensive Care Unit. He had been involved in an accident in Machakos.