A bus carrying members of a wedding party crashed off a mountain road in west Nepal and fell about 200 meters, killing at least 13 people and injuring 34 others, police said.
The bus was returning home after a wedding ceremony when it veered off the road near Budgaun village, about 500 kilometers west of Kathmandu, according to the Baitadi district police office cited by AP. The vehicle landed on flat ground after the long plunge, and rescuers later pulled bodies from the wreckage while transporting the injured to hospitals.
The AP report says the bride and groom were not aboard the bus at the time of the crash. They were traveling in a different vehicle and survived. That detail narrows the tragedy to the wedding guests and shows that the victims were not the couple themselves, but people traveling back from the ceremony.
Police said the cause of the wreck was not immediately clear and that investigators were looking into it. The report does not offer a conclusive explanation, but it places the crash in a country where road accidents are often linked to narrow mountain roads, poor maintenance and difficult terrain.
That geography is central to the story. Much of Nepal is mountainous, and transport routes in the hills can be unforgiving even under ordinary conditions. A bus that leaves the road on such terrain can turn a routine journey into a mass-casualty event in seconds.
The AP account also shows how quickly rescue efforts were mobilized once the crash occurred. Injured passengers were taken to hospitals soon after the accident on Thursday night, and the bodies were recovered from the wreckage. Those responses, while necessary, came only after a fall that was severe enough to kill nearly a third of the people reported on board.
The report does not identify the dead or injured, and it does not say how many people were on the bus in total. It also does not state whether weather, speed or a mechanical failure contributed to the crash. That restraint is important: the packet supports only the known outcome and the location of the crash, not a specific cause.
Even without those missing details, the impact is clear. A family celebration ended with funerals, hospital admissions and a police investigation. The scale of the injury count means the crash will likely strain local medical services as well as the families waiting for news.
Wedding travel is usually meant to be routine and familiar. In this case it became dangerous because the return trip took place on a mountain road where one mistake or mechanical problem can have catastrophic consequences. The AP report makes plain that the bride and groom survived, but many of their guests did not.
The tragedy adds to Nepal’s long record of deadly road accidents and highlights the vulnerability of travelers who depend on buses for long-distance movement across hilly districts. For police, the immediate work is to identify what caused the bus to leave the road. For families, the work is more basic: account for the dead, treat the injured and bring the survivors home.
The crash is another reminder that in Nepal, the steepness of the landscape is not just scenery. It is a constant safety hazard that can turn a celebration into a disaster in a matter of moments.
