One person was killed and several others injured when a bus suffered brake failure and collided with another bus in the Nuwara Eliya-Haggala area, police said.
The dead man was a 46-year-old resident of the Ratnapura area. Police said the bus that lost its brakes had arrived in Haggala carrying an excursion party. It collided with a bus travelling from Haggala towards Welimada.
Several other people were injured in the collision.
A high-risk stretch
The Nuwara Eliya-Haggala road runs through steep hill country, where sustained descents place heavy and repeated demand on brakes. Brake failure on such gradients gives drivers little scope to recover, and vehicles carrying excursion groups are typically fully loaded, adding to the strain.
The crash comes during a heavy weekend on the roads, with the Police Media Division reporting five deaths in a single 24-hour period across the island on Saturday.
Hiru News did not name the deceased, give the number of injured, say which operator either bus belonged to, or report whether anyone had been taken into custody. It also did not state the time of the collision.
At the time of writing, on Sunday night, no other verified Sri Lankan newsroom had published its own report of the crash.
Update: August 24 — the man who died was a pedestrian
Ada Derana’s Monday police roundup carried the crash as one of four road deaths in 24 hours, and supplied detail Hiru’s initial account did not.
The private bus was travelling on the Peradeniya-Chenkaladi road and ran into a second bus that had stopped ahead of it near the 75-kilometre post, Ada Derana said. The 46-year-old from Ratnapura who died was a pedestrian walking along the road, struck by the bus after the two vehicles collided — not a passenger on either bus, as the first report left open. He was admitted to Nuwara Eliya Hospital, where he died of his injuries. The bus driver and two female passengers were slightly hurt.
Ada Derana did not mention brake failure, which Hiru gave as the cause, and did not repeat Hiru’s account of an excursion party aboard the bus that lost control. The two reports are complementary rather than contradictory: the Peradeniya-Chenkaladi road is the A5, which runs through Nuwara Eliya towards Welimada by way of Haggala.
Neither outlet named the man who died, and no arrest has been reported in the case. The full roundup of Sunday’s four road deaths covers the other three.
