DAGUPAN CITY – Su Gwan Lee had traveled to Bolinao, Pangasinan, several times in the past driving his blue-green Hyundai Grace van.

Like many tourists, he must have fallen in love with the town’s pristine beaches because he kept on returning to the place every time he had the opportunity.

On Wednesday, Lee drove to the town from Baguio City to show it to his fellow Koreans and to visit a friend, Baguio City Baptist Church pastor, Alex Celeste, who he thought would be in his house in Bolinao that day.

It was Lee’s last visit to Bolinao.

As he approached the town at about 12:45 p.m. that day, his van swerved to the left side of the road and rammed into the concrete wall of a warehouse along the national highway in Barangay Sampaloc.

Lee and nine other Koreans, including a six-year-old girl, died in the accident.

Their van was wrecked after the impact and their bodies were mangled and had head injuries, Senior Insp. Rizaldy Dalope, Bolinao police chief, said.

In Baguio City, the Korean Association in Baguio (KAB) began posting the names of the victims and details of the accident in its website, www.baguiokorea.com, to help guide their relatives in Seoul on arrangements necessary to ship their remains home.

Jun Sung Lee, KAB president, went to Bolinao on Wednesday night to help police and local officials identify the victims.

The KAB identified the victims as Lee, Su Jin Park, Tae Song Park, Song Dun Park, Bu Ah Park, Byoung Bae Kwak, Myun O Han, Mi Gyeong Choi, Jong Hui Jeong and In Cheol Lee.

The group did not give the victims’ ages but the Bolinao police said the youngest victim was six-year-old Bu Ah Park.

Bolinao administrator Fred Castelo, chief of the municipal disaster coordinating council, said the bodies were taken to Manila on Thursday morning.

“[Lee] must have been driving very fast,” Dalope said. He said it was raining in the area when the accident happened.

Celeste said he was in Metro Manila at the time Lee told him that they were already near Bolinao.

“So, I told him to just tour them around,” Celeste said in a telephone interview.

Dalope said eight of the Koreans arrived in the country on Monday, most of them for the first time.

Castelo said people near the accident site did not hear shouts or cries for help before the accident occurred so it was possible that the driver was sleepy and his passengers were sleeping.

He said the victims spent their days traveling in Central and Northern Luzon. From Metro Manila, they went to the Clark Freeport, Baguio City and the Hundred Islands National Park in Alaminos City.

“Maybe they were very tired already, especially the driver who was driving since Monday night when the others arrived from Korea,” Castelo said.

Motorists who saw the accident said the van was cruising fast amid the rain and was swerving before it crashed into a warehouse of a construction supply store.

Castelo said if the van skidded toward the shop, more people could have been hurt or killed. Gabriel Cardinoza, Yolanda Sotelo-Fuertes and Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon