Twenty-six people were killed and 30 injured after a tourist bus caught fire in central China, local officials said.
The vehicle burst into flames as it drove through Hunanprovince Friday with 56 people on board — including 53 passengers, two driversand a tour guide — according to local authorities.
The injured, including five in a critical condition, wererushed to hospital for treatment.
The two drivers were detained and an investigation into thecause of the accident is under way, according to a statement posted on the cityof Changde’s official social media account on Weibo.
Grisly car accidents are common in China, where transportauthorities struggle to enforce safety regulations, which are often flouted.
Some 58,000 people were killed in traffic accidents acrossthe country in 2015, the latest year for which the data is available publicly.Violations of traffic laws were blamed for nearly 90 per cent of accidents thatcaused deaths or injuries that year.
In November, at least 13 people died when a bus plunged offa bridge in Chongqing municipality, after the driver got into a fist fight witha passenger who had missed her stop.
Search and rescue teams dispatched more than 70 boats, aswell as a team of scuba divers and underwater robots, to find the wreckage andretrieve bodies from the water.
In February, a van packed with pressurised gas tanks and petrol-filledbottles caught fire and ploughed into pedestrians in Shanghai, leaving at least18 people injured.
Authorities concluded that it had been a “trafficaccident”.