{"id":36905,"date":"2019-03-23T08:23:24","date_gmt":"2019-03-23T08:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=36905"},"modified":"2019-03-23T08:23:24","modified_gmt":"2019-03-23T08:23:24","slug":"dozens-killed-in-china-tour-bus-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=36905","title":{"rendered":"Dozens killed in China tour bus fire"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Twenty six people were killed and at least 28 injured after a tourist bus caught fire in central China<\/a>, local officials said.<\/p>\n

The vehicle burst into flames as it drove through Hunan province on Friday evening with 56 people on board – including 53 passengers, two drivers and a tour guide – according to local authorities.<\/p>\n

The injured, including five in a critical condition, were rushed to hospital for treatment.<\/p>\n

The two drivers were detained and an investigation into the cause of the accident is under way, according to a statement posted on the city of Changde’s official social media account on Weibo. <\/p>\n

Grisly car accidents are common in China, where transport authorities struggle to enforce safety regulations, which are often flouted.<\/p>\n

Some 58,000 people were killed in traffic accidents across the country in 2015, the latest year for which the data is available publicly.<\/p>\n

Flouting the rules<\/h2>\n

Violations of traffic laws were blamed for nearly 90 percent of accidents that caused deaths or injuries that year.<\/p>\n

In November, at least 13 people died when a bus plunged 50 metres off a bridge into the Yangtze River in Chongqing municipality, after the driver got into a fistfight with a passenger who had missed her stop.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Search and rescue teams dispatched more than 70 boats, as well as a team of scuba divers and underwater robots, to find the wreckage and retrieve bodies from the water.<\/p>\n

In February, a van packed with pressurised gas tanks and petrol-filled bottles caught fire and ploughed into pedestrians in Shanghai, leaving at least 18 people injured.<\/p>\n

Authorities concluded that it had been a “traffic accident”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Twenty six people were killed and at least 28 injured after a tourist bus caught fire in central China, local officials said. The vehicle burst into flames as it drove through Hunan province on Friday evening with 56 people on board – including 53 passengers, two drivers and a tour guide – according to local…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}