Two people were killed and 26 injured when a coach carrying a travel group of 40 to 50 people, most of them from the Philippines, ran off the A96 motorway in southern Germany and overturned early on Sunday, Sept. 27, 2026.
The crash happened just before 6 a.m. (0400 GMT) near the town of Buchloe, in the eastern Allgäu district of Bavaria, on the stretch of road between the junctions east of Buchloe and west of Landsberg am Lech. No other vehicles were involved.
Around 25 of those hurt suffered slight injuries. One more person was critically injured and in life-threatening condition, a police spokeswoman said — a toll of 26 injured in all. Police cautioned that the number could still rise.
What Police Say Happened
The account given by investigators is brief and, so far, without explanation. The coach veered off the road to the right, police said, overturning at the roadside and coming to rest beside a dip that runs alongside the motorway. Nothing else was involved — no collision, no second vehicle, no chain reaction in traffic.
That detail matters, because it narrows the questions investigators must answer to the coach itself and the moments before it left the pavement.
A Large Rescue Operation on a Closed Motorway
A large contingent of rescue workers was dispatched to the site. Emergency services and firefighters worked at the scene near Buchloe, and the motorway was shut in both directions after the crash.
The closure cut one of southern Bavaria’s busier east-west links. The Swabian town of Buchloe lies directly on the A96, between the Bavarian state capital of Munich and Memmingen, and the route carries a steady stream of long-distance traffic, including the tour coaches that ferry visitors across the region.
Police said the group aboard the coach numbered between 40 and 50 people and was made up mainly of travelers from the Philippines.
Investigators Turn to the Cause
The public prosecutor’s office has commissioned an expert to establish what caused the coach to leave the road. Such appointments are routine in German fatal-crash inquiries, and the expert’s findings typically cover the vehicle’s condition, its speed and the physical evidence left on the roadway and at the point where it came to rest.
No conclusions have been announced. Police did not attribute the crash to any factor in their initial account.
Coach Crashes Across Europe
The Buchloe crash is the latest in a run of serious coach accidents on European roads.
On Sept. 10, five people died when a Dutch coach was involved in an accident in Switzerland. In that crash, the coach struck a crash barrier, then veered off the road to the right, overturned and came to rest on its side — a sequence that echoes, in broad outline, what unfolded on the A96, though the two incidents are separate and were reported by different authorities.
Bavaria itself saw another coach crash days earlier. On Sept. 6, in the Regensburg district, 30 people were injured when a car rear-ended a coach and a second vehicle in slow-moving traffic, police said. Nobody was reported killed in that collision.
Coaches remain among the safest ways to move large groups by road, but when one leaves the carriageway the consequences scale with the number of people aboard. A single vehicle carrying 40 to 50 passengers can, in seconds, generate a mass-casualty scene that strains local fire and ambulance services — which is why the response near Buchloe drew crews from across the surrounding area and kept the motorway closed while the injured were treated and moved.
Two deaths are confirmed. One person remains in life-threatening condition, and police have said plainly that the count of the injured may yet climb. For now, the central question — how a coach full of travelers came to drift off the right side of a motorway in the half-light of a Sunday morning — rests with the expert appointed by the public prosecutor’s office.