Chinese Police Arrest Driver After 14 Passengers Die In Bus Crash

[News_Editor]

Chinese police arrest driver after 14 passengers die in bus crash 2012-04-25 10:40:27 GMT+7 (ICT) CHANGSHU, CHINA (BNO NEWS) -- A bus driver was arrested in eastern China on Tuesday on suspicion his fatigue from playing hours of computer games led to the deaths of fourteen of his passengers over the weekend, police said.Wang Zhenwei, a man in his thirties, was driving thirty-one Shanghai tourists to view peony blossom in Changshu city on Sunday morning when the bus cut through highway barriers and collided head-on with a heavy truck coming from the opposite direction. The accident happened at 9:25 a.m. local time on the Yanjiang Expressway in Changshu.A spokesman for the State Administration of Work Safety said thirteen people were killed at the scene of the accident while another victim died at a local hospital hours later, raising the overall death toll to 14. A total of 20 others, most of them passengers on the bus, were injured.Police in Jiangsu province arrested Wang on Tuesday, saying his fatigue caused him to lose control of the bus. Officials said Wang had played computer games at Internet cafes the night before the accident and as a result slept less than four hours. He allegedly had also taken crystal meth on Friday night.The state-run Xinhua news agency said Wang suffered only minor injuries as a result of Sunday's accident, but he later tried to jump from the eleventh floor of a hospital building but was stopped just in time by firefighters.Roads in China are known to be among the most dangerous in the world with more than 70,000 fatalities and 300,000 injured a year, according to the country's Public Security Ministry. Many accidents are the result of drivers violating traffic laws, fatigue, poor road conditions and overloaded vehicles.Earlier this month, twenty-four people were killed when a sand-hauling truck collided head-on with a passenger bus on a road near Wangzhai township in Xiaoxian county, which is located in the central province of Anhui. The powerful impact completely smashed the fronts of both vehicles, leaving only two survivors on the bus.

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