Some 5,000 mourners on Wednesday attended a funeral service for 15 children and two adults from a school in Belgium who died in a bus crash last week in Switzerland.
Soldiers carried small white coffins into the hall where the ceremony, at which King Albert II, flanked by the Dutch crown prince, was to join mourners from 11:00 am (1000 GMT) in this Belgian-Dutch border town.
Belgian and Dutch Prime Ministers Elio Di Rupo and Mark Rutte and Swiss President Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf were also taking part in the memorial service, alongside members of the Swiss rescue services, the firemen, police and other aid workers who pulled the children from the wreckage and air-lifted them to hospital.
A teacher\'s aide and a child already buried in private will be remembered by photos during the hour-long service, ahead of private family burials in the Lommel cemetery.
A separate memorial has been scheduled for Thursday in the town of Heverlee, home to the other seven children and two adults killed in the crash.
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