By Neelam Rahim

At least 32 people were killed in southeast Turkey on Saturday when vehicles crashed into first respondents who were attending earlier accidents.

Sixteen people, including emergency workers and journalists, died when a bus crashed into an earlier accident site, regional governor Davut Gul from southeastern Gaziantep said. Another 20 people were wounded and received treatment, as per Reuters.

The DHA press agency said a passenger bus had crashed into an ambulance, a firefighting truck and a vehicle carrying journalists at the location of a previous crash.

Local media reported that three paramedics, three firefighters, and two journalists from Turkey’s Ilhas news agency were killed.

“At around 10:45 this morning, a passenger bus crashed here,” Gul said, speaking from the scene of the accident on the road east of Gaziantep.

“While the fire brigade, medical teams and colleagues responded to the accident, another bus crashed 200 metres behind. The second bus slid to the current site and hit the first responders and the wounded people on the ground.”

In the second accident, which happened at Derik in Mardin province, 250 kilometres away aloof from the first one, reports said the emergency services were also attending to an earlier incident at the location when a truck plowed into a crowd of onlookers.

Some 26 people were injured, six of them seriously, by the hurtling truck, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca wrote on Twitter.

The accident in Derik in Mardin province “occurred after the breaks gave out on a lorry, which hit a crowd,” Koca wrote.