Officials suspect brake failure in uMsunduzi taxi crash
KZN Transport officials have described the taxi involved in yesterday's horror crash in the Msunduzi area as severely overloaded with suspected brake failure.
Nineteen people were killed - most of them women.
Official investigations are underway into why the vehicle left the road and plunged down an embankment yesterday morning.
The department says it understands that the driver had lost control of the minibus.
He had been transporting 26 people in a vehicle certified to carry a maximum of 16 passengers.
They were members of a Zionist church in KwaXimba, west of Durban. The department's Kwanele Ncalane says the congregants were returning home from church.
"We did interact with some of the church members. They were very devastated but the MEC on behalf of the provincial government consoled them and offered words of condolences.
"This is the highest order of recklessness - where [there was] negligence with such a high number of people," he says.
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