Six people have died in a head-on collision involving two lorries, a minibus and several other vehicles in Lincolnshire at 5am today.
Lincolnshire Police said that the crash was caused by “an overtaking manoeuvre that has gone badly wrong”.
A lorry driver whose vehicle was damaged in the collision described to BBC television how he had known there would be a crash when another vehicle pulled out to overtake him - into the path of a queue of oncoming traffic, headed by the minibus.
“I took good hold of my steering wheel and braced myself,” he said. “There was a bang and I’m not sure what happened after that. I saw red lights everywhere.”
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Five of the fatalities were from the minibus, thought to have been carrying male migrant workers travelling to work in Mansfield, and the other was one of the HGV drivers. Three people have been taken to hospital in the nearby town of Grantham with serious but not life threatening injuries. Two of the injured were the remaining two occupants of the minibus.
The collision happened on the A52 between Sedgebrook and Bottesford, on the Leicestershire border.
A spokesman for Lincolnshire Police told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the visibility and road conditions appeared to have been good.
Emergency workers could not give an exact death toll for several hours as the devastation was so great. Speaking at the scene, Chief Superintendent Dave Wheeler said: “It’s a scene of carnage. We know there are six confirmed dead. At the moment we are trying to establish identity.
“The bodies are still in situ. It’s an horrific scene and all the emergency services are working together to gradually clear the scene.”
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The road is expected to remain closed all day between the A1 and the A46.
Mary Williams, chief executive of national road safety charity Brake, said: “If this devastating crash in Lincolnshire is due to dangerous overtaking, the Government must ask serious questions about what more it can do to stop this lethal behaviour.
“Crashes caused when overtaking on Britain’s fast, rural A-roads are shockingly common, yet frequently result in multiple fatalities due to the speed of impact.
“Yet there is no Government advertising campaign about the dangers of overtaking, despite the fact that many of our roads are bendy, narrow, and often wet, with a limit of 60mph, only 10mph slower than a motorway.”