A car involved in a motorway crash in which five people, including two children, died had been travelling on the wrong side of the road at the time, it has emerged.
Cumbria police said officers were called to a report of a Skoda travelling south on the northbound carriageway of the M6 near Tebay Services at 4.04pm on Tuesday.
The officers were en route to the scene when further calls were received reporting the Skoda had been involved in a head-on collision with a Toyota, the force said.
The 42-year-old man driving the Toyota, as well as a 33-year-old woman and two boys aged 15 and seven, all from Glasgow, were pronounced dead at the scene.
The 40-year-old Cambridgeshire man driving the Skoda was also declared dead at the crash site.
A third boy in the Toyota, also aged seven, was airlifted to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, where he remains in a serious condition.
All six people involved in the crash have yet to be formally identified.
Police said the motorway was closed from junction 36 to 39 and reopened in the early hours of Wednesday.
Chris Isles, a publican from Kirkoswald, near Penrith, said he was about 45 metres away from the crash and saw black smoke and flames.
“From where I was, 50 yards further back, it just seemed like a vehicle fire,” he told the PA Media news agency. “I was parked up and I could see the smoke. It hadn’t really happened that long. I literally must have been two minutes behind it happening.
“I got out of my [camper van] and just looked down the line and between the lines of vehicles in front of me; I could see there was quite a big fire that started. This was at 4.10pm. Less than 20 minutes later the air ambulance was there.”
Isles took a photo of smoke billowing into the sky. He said he was driving home and expecting to be on the motorway for seven minutes but it ended up being three and a half hours. “I was up near the front. They seemed to have turned everybody back from the back of the queue forward. So where we were, we were probably some of the last people to get off. It was about half past seven when we eventually got moved.”
He said he felt “really shocked” and was “thinking of the family of everybody” involved. “It’s terrible. It never crossed my mind that there would have been five people killed. It’s awful.”
The crash was also attended by Great North air ambulance, the north-west ambulance service, Cumbria fire and rescue service and volunteer doctors who were part of the Beep Doctors group.
The families of those involved were being supported by specially trained officers, Cumbria constabulary said.
Police appealed for anyone with information to contact them online at www.cumbria.police.uk/report-it, quoting incident number 146 of 15 October 2024; or by phoning 101.