At least 14 people were killed and five others were injured on Thursday when a combi carrying 19 passengers fell into an abyss outside San Juan in Cajamarca, in northern Peru. Police and fire brigades were still working at the site as rescuers tried to pull bodies from the ravine.
Ricardo Chilón said the toll stood at 14 dead and five injured after the fall, while the injured were taken to the regional hospital in Cajamarca. The vehicle had been traveling from San Juan to Ciudad de Dios when it went down the slope more than 800 kilometers north of Lima.
The scene remained difficult because the vehicle was wedged in the ravine, Edson Román said, adding that six dead people still had to be recovered. That gap between the first casualty count and the bodies still trapped below underlined how far the rescue had to go before the full toll could be confirmed.
The cause of the accident has not been established. In Peru, road crashes are frequent and are often tied to poor road conditions, weak police control and human error linked to speed, and official data showed more than 3,000 road deaths in the previous year.
For the families waiting in Cajamarca, the priority now is not the investigation but the recovery. The unanswered question is no longer how serious the crash was; it is how many bodies the teams can still bring up from the abyss.
