A double-decker bus carrying secondary school pupils from the German town of Marburg north of Frankfurt had a serious accident on the way to England in the Sauerland region.
According to the police, 27 pupils aged 14 and 15 were injured on Sunday, four of them seriously. They were taken to hospital, but the four children's lives were not in danger, the police announced on Sunday.
Five teachers who were accompanying the school trip and the bus driver were uninjured, a police spokesman said on Sunday. However, many were suffering from shock.
The bus with a total of 73 people on board suddenly overturned early on Sunday morning on the A45 motorway near the western German town of Wenden, according to reports. It came to rest on the hard shoulder and a grass verge.
The cause of the accident was initially unclear, a police spokesman said on Sunday. An accident investigation team carried out investigations at the scene.
Rescue workers treated the injured and distraught young people at the scene and took the seriously injured victims to hospital. A short time later, another bus arrived to take the other pupils and their escorts away from the accident site and back home. Some parents also picked up their children. The school trip was cancelled.
The bus was to be righted and towed away on Sunday, the police spokesman added.
The A45 motorway was closed ahead of the scene of the accident and traffic was diverted. The closure was to last for several hours.
Just a few weeks earlier, on the night of Good Friday, a double-decker coach that left the A44 motorway near the town of Werl in North Rhine Westphalia drove into an embankment and crashed onto its side. Twenty people were injured - students from a vocational college in Warburg in North Rhine Westphalia, this time on their way back from a trip to England.
Days earlier, four travellers died when their double-decker bus overturned on the A9 near Leipzig. Thirty people were injured.