The minibus on the asphalt road that connects the tourist resort of Diani Beach to Mombasa, whose airport is now more easily accessible via the new bridge and a ring road that many drivers have not yet got used to. There are six tourists on board, including a young girl on holiday with her father, a man and three other women. They are enjoying the days spent in the heat and African nature, on the white beaches of a less ‘trendy’ destination that is less frequented by Italians than the more celebrated Watamu and Malindi, but where the tour operator Alpitour offers exclusive packages in a beautiful resort.
Suddenly a lorry tries to overtake the vehicle carrying the Italians, which shows that the speed the driver was travelling at wasn't very high. The lorry can't pull back in time and forces the minibus off the road, onto a dirt track and down a slight slope, causing it to overturn.
The man dies instantly, the teenager's father and the women are injured, the girl is miraculously unharmed. At the scene of the accident there is the usual crowd of people, the ambulances arrive relatively quickly, after the police.
One of the women dies during transport to hospital, the others, after receiving the necessary treatment, are declared cautiously out of danger. The young girl was taken back to the hotel and assisted by the honorary consulate of Mombasa, while the Italian embassy followed the story, in contact with the tour operator Alpitour, who had an assistant on site, and our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who immediately traced the relatives of the tourists.
This is the chronicle of one of those episodes that you don't want to have to talk about and in which you prefer to omit names, origins and life stories so as not to make the story even more tragic, and not to romanticise unnecessarily when someone in Italy has just received news that they certainly weren't expecting, imagining their loved ones carving out a slice of the good life for themselves, and maybe even envying them a little.
The accident was reconstructed by listening to some Italian residents on the spot, while the local police limited themselves to stating that the exact dynamics of the accident are still to be established, and the local press had not yet published the news at the time of our publication.
Unfortunately for those who live and work in Kenya, road accidents are a daily occurrence, due to a series of contributing factors that include the high speed of drivers, the roads that almost always have only two lanes, the condition of the asphalt full of potholes and the precarious state of the vehicles. Over all this hovers the spectre of corruption, which renders the controls of offences and state of vehicles practically null, in exchange for bribes to the road inspectors. Fortunately, as far as Italian tourists are concerned, despite the fact that more than 90 thousand have travelled through Kenya this year, we don't often hear about fatal accidents. This year there has been one fatality, while last January the son of the singer Zucchero, Adelmo Blue Fornaciari, escaped with only fractures. In the accident that occurred between Malindi and Watamu at dawn, however, a Kenyan girl died.