The driver of the truck that crashed into a group of cemetery-goers in Hai Duong City yesterday afternoon, leaving eight people dead, tested positive for heroin, the local media reported, citing provincial police.

The scene of the accident which killed eight people in Hai Duong Province. The truck driver tested positive for heroin

Earlier, the driver, who was identified as Luong Van Tam, 28, temporarily residing in Hanoi, had left the scene after the accident, which occurred at 1:55 p.m. on a National Highway No.5 section passing Kim Luong Commune in Kim Thanh District. He turned himself in to police yesterday evening.

While traveling from Hanoi to Haiphong City, Tam crashed into the cemetery-goers who were walking in a lane for non-motorized vehicles. The 50-60 State employees, veterans and other elderly officials of Kim Luong Commune had just returned from the local martyrs’ cemetery where they had burned incense on the occasion of the commune’s congress of the Vietnam Fatherland Front Committee.

At 6 p.m. on the same day, Minister of Transport Nguyen Van The arrived at the scene to direct the response team. The and the representative officials then visited the victims at Kim Thanh District’s General Hospital.

Also, The urged police agencies to launch an investigation into the cause of the accident, while the Directorate for Roads of Vietnam was asked to produce an overview report on the area’s traffic infrastructure.

Local news site VOV cited investigation results from the Directorate for Roads of Vietnam as saying that the truck’s event data recorder, or black box, was turned off at the time of the accident. Further, the black box was inactive for all of 2018, resulting in no data being sent to the road administration.

According to Khuat Viet Hung, vice chairman of the National Traffic Safety Committee, the vehicle’s owner was uncooperative and provided no information when the Department of Transport in Hanoi contacted the owner to verify information related to the accident.

SGT