Three people, including two Nepalese students, died when a truck slammed into a bus that had stopped due to engine trouble on the shoulder of a highway in northeastern Japan, police said Wednesday.
All of the bus passengers — 39 students from Nepal and one from Bangladesh — were outside of the vehicle when it was rear-ended by the truck around 8:10 p.m. Tuesday night on the Tohoku Expressway in Kurihara, Miyagi Prefecture, killing two of the Nepalese and the driver of the bus.
The students included some studying Japanese in Miyagi who were on their way to part-time jobs in Ichinoseki in neighboring Iwate Prefecture.
The driver, a Japanese woman in her 50s, was the president of a taxi firm in Sendai that owned the bus, according to a company source.
The driver of the truck owned by a company in Aomori Prefecture, who is in his 30s, sustained heavy injuries, the police said.