A drunk driver ploughed into pedestrians in an Italian Alpine village on Sunday, killing six German tourists and injuring 11 other people, emergency services said. The accident happened at around 1:15 am (0015 GMT) in the village of Lutago near the Austrian border in an area popular with skiers.

A group of German tourists had just got off a bus as they returned to their hotel from an evening at a nightclub when the car slammed into them at high speed - throwing some of them dozens of metres.

"I cry with those who have lost their children, their brothers and sisters, their friends, in the night," German Chancellor Angela Merkel wrote on Twitter, wishing those injured a swift recovery.

Six Germans were killed, a fire service official in Lutago told AFP. Eleven other people were injured - two of whom were seriously hurt and flown by helicopter to a hospital in the Austrian city of Innsbruck.

The local head of Italy's paramilitary carabinieri police force told AFP the driver had between 1.9 and 2.0 grams of alcohol per litre in his blood, about four times the maximum allowed level. The 27-year-old local resident was charged with murder and put in hospital under police guard.

"I had just dropped the youths off when I saw the car coming at a crazy speed," the bus driver told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. "I flashed my headlights in vain to tell the driver to slow down. A few seconds later I saw these poor kids flying through the air in my rear-view mirror." Roughly 160 emergency workers went to help out after the accident and a field hospital was set up at the side of the road.