A mother, father and their four-year-old child were killed late on Saturday evening in a multi-car pile-up on the S8 highway - poland

Motorway pile-up kills three people

The three victims were identified as a 35-year-old man, a 37-year-old woman and their child and are believed to be from the Czech Republic. A fourth person in that car was among the six people who were treated in hospital following the 11 vehicle crash which happened in heavy fog near the village of Kowiesy on the road between Warsaw and Piotrkow Trybunalski in the Lodzkie province.

The 28-year-old Belarusian driver of one of the lorries was arrested after investigators discovered his tachograph records showed his lorry had been travelling at 95 km/h moments before the crash. He has been held without charge but may yet face charges of causing death by dangerous driving.

It was initially reported that the cause of the crash had been a car pulling onto the edge of the central reservation due to the severely restricted visibility caused by a heavy bank of fog. In turn eight cars and two lorries were then reported to have ploughed into each other. But prosecutors investigating the crash dismissed this later in the week and while they believe the incident happened because of a stationary car on the right hand side of the carriageway, it was still too early to explain exactly what had happened.

The prosecutor Krzysztof Kopania explained that they had spoken to one woman driver who was involved in the crash. She told them that she “Slowed down gently to 40km/h. The fog was so thick that (my) husband had to open the window because we couldn’t see where the barriers were”. She said that she had wanted to pull over but before she was able to her car was struck so hard from behind by another vehicle “that the back seats collapsed”. Having got out of her vehicle to exchange insurance details a truck then pulled over in front of them. “The driver got out and said if we didn’t stop doing this everyone would be killed” the woman told investigators.

Health Minister Bartosz Arlukowicz promised an immediate investigation into why the rescue operation left some victims trapped in their cars for over an hour after Dziennik Lodzki revealed taped conversations between dispatchers and ambulance services seem to suggest confusion as to who was and was not present at the scene.