At least 18 people were killed and dozens more injured when a double-decker bus rolled over in Hong Kong on Saturday morning, police said.
Photographs from local media sites show the sideways, roof-torn bus at the edge of a road in the locality of Tai Po in the northern New Territories.
The bus skidded and hit a lamppost. The causes of the accident were not immediately known, but passengers quoted by the media said that the driver was driving very fast before the crash.
The bus was traveling at a speed much higher than that used by bus passengers, a wounded passenger told the online edition of the South China Morning Post.
Passengers reportedly complained to the driver who was 10 minutes late on the schedule. It accelerated before the accident, the Apple Daily reported, citing injured passengers.
The driver "intentionally used the bus to get through his anger," said another injured passenger at the Oriental Daily.
Rescuers were trying to pull the passengers out of the vehicle's carcass and the police were not able to say how many people were still inside.
The people killed in the accident are fifteen men and three women.
Cheuk-ting, a member of the Democratic Party, called on the government to address the issue of the double-decker model, with upper-tier passengers, often ripped off in accidents, being particularly vulnerable.
The most serious road accident in the city occurred in 2003 when a double-decker bus collided with a truck before it fell off a bridge, killing 21 people.
Eighteen people also died in a bus accident in 2008. In 2012, the collision of a ferry with a pleasure boat had left 39 dead.
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