French investigators try to identify coach crash victims

French investigators began Saturday trying to identify the bodies of 43 victims of a coach crash blaze near Bordeaux, while combing the wreckage for answers to what caused the country's worst road accident in three decades. 

Experts from a police victim identification unit set up a tented centre overnight with equipment and tables for carrying out examinations following Friday's collision, a local police chief told AFP.

In the worst accident on French roads in 33 years, a coach carrying members of a pensioners' club on an excursion collided with a lorry and burst into flames near the village of Puisseguin, among the vineyards of the Saint-Emilion area.

They will begin working from sunrise, body by body, in a very methodic way using DNA and dental remains to try to put names to the bodies, said Ghislain Rety, police colonel in the Gironde region.

Many of the victims were thought to have died in the fire, according to emergency workers and local authorities, and officials say formally identifying them all could take up to three weeks.

One of the survivors told Saturday of the desperate efforts to rescue people from the burning coach.

The fire broke out straight away -- it was like lightning," 73-year-old retired carpenter Jean-Claude Leonardet, who managed to escape the burning vehicle, told Le Parisien newspaper.

We went back to pull two people who were trapped on the stairs and couldn't get out, he said.

We couldn't go back there -- the fire and the smoke were overwhelming.