A man was killed and three people were critically injured when a coach crashed and plunged down an embankment near Alton Towers leisure park.

The single-decker vehicle was returning after taking migrant workers on a day-trip to the Staffordshire theme park.

It hit two parked cars in Station Road, Alton, ploughed through a brick wall and dropped about 15ft down a bank, landing on its side in the garden of a nearby house.

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Emergency services were scrambled to the scene shortly before 6pm yesterday.

A 26-year-old man, from Poland, was pronounced dead at the scene.

The other 70 adults on the coach – including Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Romanians, a South African and the British driver, from Lincolnshire – were rescued from either the coach itself or nearby.

Twenty one – including two by air ambulance – were taken to hospitals in Stoke-on-Trent, Stafford, Burton upon Trent and Selly Oak. Three of them were today in a critical condition, four were stable, 12 suffered minor injuries and two have been discharged.

The coach, from Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, had taken the passengers on a day-trip to Alton Towers.