Grieving Belgians stage vigil for bus crash victims

Grieving Belgians held an emotional vigil Thursday as classmates and neighbours of many of the children killed in a bus crash in a Swiss alpine tunnel turned out to pray for the dead.

Police in Lommel, a sleepy town of 33,000, said 2,500 people attended a Catholic service in Saint-Joseph’s church near the school that had sent 22 pupils and two teachers on the fateful skiing holiday.

Only seven pupils survived.

The town’s grief set the tone for a national day of mourning on Friday, when a minute’s silence will be observed at 11:00 am (1000 GMT), flags will fly at half-mast and drivers of buses, metros and trains throughout the country have been asked to switch off their engines as a mark of respect.

In the church, candles were lit in memory of the dead pupils and teachers.

“With this candle, I am thinking of you,” a church worker said for each of the 24 names read out.

In all, 28 of the 52 people on the bus — six of them adults — died when it smashed head-on into a tunnel wall at high speed late Tuesday.

With the church only able to seat 350 mourners, hundreds of chairs were packed out in front of a giant screen in the town in northeast Belgium, close to the Dutch border.

As night fell, people of all ages who had streamed to the church, where a message of sympathy from Pope Benedict XVI was read, passed by the school again on their way back.

“We didn’t much feel like working at school today,” said an 11-year-old pupil who asked not to be named.

“We did drawings, we played and we spoke about what happened,” she added.

The bodies of the dead are to be flown back to Belgium on Friday with the first of the children injured in the crash heading home on Thursday evening.

In Switzerland, police commander Christian Varone said 19 of the bodies had been identified to date.

Classmates of the children killed wept in the schoolyard earlier in the day as they faced up to the trauma of the horrific crash.

“We could not sleep last night,” said an open letter written by teachers from the ‘t Stekske school. “There were so many things going through our heads.”

As the school-gates opened at 8:00 am, wet-eyed children accompanied by tense parents came bearing flowers, toys, drawings, candles and words of comfort.

“No more future, no more beautiful children’s dreams, just your unbearable and endless pain: we share it with you,” said a message left among piles of flowers massed by the school entrance.

Small children lit candles and pinned up home-drawn pictures for the dead as families hastened past hordes of media held back by police to give the community privacy to grieve.

In the yard of the primary school of around 200 children, whose name means “the little matchstick” in Dutch, small boys kicked a football around while waiting for the bell to ring as older children huddled in groups, many of them sobbing.

The toll at the school was particularly high, apparently because the ‘t Stekske group was seated at the front of the bus when it smashed into the tunnel wall.

The school is organising psychological help for the teachers and pupils.

Two teachers and seven children from Sint-Lambertus school in central Belgium also died.

“The whole country weeps for its children,” Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo told parliament as he announced the day of mourning.

“Nothing will ever be the same again,” said Anouck Janssens, who lives near the school. “The news hit us like a bomb, it was horrible.”