Nine people, including six children, were killed and four others seriously injured Monday after a freak accident involving a cable car in Austria's mountainous Tirol region, the Austrian news agency APA reported. According to the operator of the cable car, a passenger gondola plummeted to the ground after being hit by a 750 kilo slab of concrete that fell around 300 metres from a transport helicopter, APA said. The gondola dragged two others with it. The helicopter was carrying construction material to a lift station on the 3,309-metre Schwarze Schneid mountain when it lost its load above the Solden Otztal skiing region. Police confirmed that all the dead were German tourists. Rescue personnel and four helicopters rushed to the scene, but for most of the victims help came too late. The injured were taken to the university clinic in Innsbruck. The incident is the second serious gondola accident involving an aircraft. In 1998, 20 people died near Cavalese in the Italy's Dolomites when a U.S. military jet accidently snapped a cable car's line with its tail fin.
