(21 Mar 2012) On March 15th 2012 the police chief heading the investigation into the Swiss Alps bus tragedy confirmed at a news conference at the crash site that 19 of the 28 victims have been formally identified.
Christian Varone also confirmed that nine more bodies were in the process of being identified.
Some of the families of the victims and eight of the less severely injured children who have been released from hospitals were expected to be flown back home to Belgium during the night of March 15th.
Survivors of the crash have been quoted in Swiss and Belgian media claiming the driver of the bus on Tuesday had reached to change a DVD on the onboard entertainment system shortly before the crash.
Varone, who was asked repeatedly by reporters on March 15th about the DVD theory, declined to address the questions directly.
"At this moment we are excluding no leads, we will examine all of them but we will not favour any of them," he said.
Varone said that no line of inquiry was being excluded or made a priority.
Relatives of the victims visited the site of the crash inside the Tunnel de Geronde earlier on March 15th.
Family members carried flowers to the site where 21 Belgians and seven Dutch were killed and laid the bouquets inside the tunnel.
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On March 14th mourners laid flowers and placed drawings and other tributes outside a school in Heverlee to pay their respects to the 22 schoolchildren and six adults killed in a bus accident as they returned to Belgium from a ski school trip in Switzerland.
Another 24 students were hospitalised, police said, after one of the deadliest highway accidents in Swiss history.
"I want to mark, to put flowers, to mark a little solidarity to other parents, and this is also a little way of praying in general for any parent and even ourselves," said Nicholas Cambier, hand in hand with his child as they placed flowers outside the school gate.
The bus carrying 52 people, including students of around age 12 from two different Belgian schools, hit the wall of the Tunnel deGeronde shortly after 9 p.m. (2000) on the night of March 13th on a highway near the southern town of Sierre, Switzerland, in an area of popular ski resorts.
The bus was carrying students from two towns, Lommel, east of Antwerp, and Heverlee, near Leuven.
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On March 21st thousands of mourners attended a special memorial service for the 28 victims, 22 of them schoolchildren, who died in last week's bus crash in a Swiss tunnel.
Under a sparkling sky, soldiers in solemn procession bore 15 coffins into a 5,000-capacity hall in Lommel, Belgium.
One brown casket contained the remains of a teacher, and there were 14 white ones, each containing the body of a child on the cusp of their teenage years.
The students and the teacher were from one of two schools in northern Belgium that shared a bus on a ski trip in Switzerland.
They were returning from their holiday on March 13th when tragedy struck.
Their bus, carrying 52 people, slammed into a tunnel wall.
24 children were also injured. The cause of the crash remains under investigation.
The ceremony lasted three hours and was attended by members of the Belgian and Dutch royal families.
Relatives and friends of those who died in the accident presented flowers while some had the courage to speak to the assembled congregation and pay tribute to the departed loved ones.
The ceremony was also relayed via video link to several hundred people outside.
A separate service will be held on March 22nd for the victims from the other school, in the town of Heverlee.
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