KEBITIGOLLEWA (Sri Lanka), June 15: The crowded bus was ferrying mothers and children to a free medical clinic in central Sri Lanka, but many ended up in a make-shift morgue after a landmine blast by Tamil rebels.

The yellow and green bus, meant to carry only 60 passengers, was already loaded with more than 160 passengers and slowly crossing an area known for wild elephants when the bomb ripped it apart.

“According to the bus crew, they had issued 164 tickets, but it is possible there were more people travelling,” a police official at the scene told AFP.

A heap of slippers and shoes lay among the blood-soaked floorboards of the bus. The driver’s side of the bus was peppered with shrapnel holes made by hundreds of pellets packed into the Claymore mines.

A 67-year-old woman said all she heard was a huge explosion and remembers the bus toppling.

“That’s all I can remember,” she said amid sobs. “There were dead bodies all around me.”

M. Jayawardene, an elderly farmer, said his daughter was among those killed in the blast.

“She had got into the bus a few minutes before it was hit. I came here when I heard the explosion. I clambered into the bus. There were people fallen everywhere and I saw my daughter’s body and pulled it out.”

A schoolboy was too upset to speak. He was still in shock. Other survivors said his mother and two sisters were among those killed.

A rural hospital waiting room was turned into morgue to cope with the 58 bodies of men, women and children killed in Thursday’s blast which also wounded 80. Six of them later succumbed to their injuries.

Police believe there were two mines set up to target the bus as it made its way through a thinly-populated area just four kilometres from its final destination, the village of Kebitigollewa.

Usually motorists are wary about driving in these parts of the country fearing attacks from wild elephants.

The government said on Thursday’s bombing was the work of Tamil Tigers. The LTTE denied the allegation, but hundreds of ethnic Sinhalese in neighbouring areas here moved to the main government school fearing more attacks from the rebels.

“A 12-year-old girl was taken to hospital just now,” media minister Anura Yapa told AFP as the military transported a group of journalists to the scene of the carnage. There was an unusual number of children and women packed into the bus because they were travelling to the rural hospital here for the weekly free clinics conducted by government doctors.

Another group of about 50 people was also travelling in the bus to attend the funeral of a home guard shot dead by Tamil Tiger rebels on Wednesday. Only a few of the mourners survived.—AFP