A TOUR bus carrying 24 visitors from the Chinese mainland burst into flames on a highway in Taiwan yesterday, killing all 26 people on board, officials said, in the deadliest accident involving mainland tourism to the island.

    The accident took place on the No. 2 highway in Taoyuan County, south of Taipei, where Taiwan’s international airport is located, the county’s fire and rescue service said in a statement.

    It said 24 of those on board were visitors from the Chinese mainland, who had been scheduled to fly home yesterday afternoon. The others killed were the driver and a tour guide, both Taiwanese.

    The Dalian Tourism Bureau in Liaoning Province confirmed that 21 of the victims from the mainland were from Dalian, while the other three came from Heilongjiang, Jilin and Hunan provinces.

    Three of the victims were children — two 13-year-olds and a 12-year-old, according to a passenger manifest distributed to media by the Taiwanese travel agency that organized the trip.

    Taoyuan fire chief Lai Chi-chong said all of the victims died inside the bus. “There was not enough time for them to escape,” he told reporters.

    Video from the scene showed both of the bus’ doors pressed up against the highway’s guard rail, making them impossible to open. Photos showed flames and thick black smoke pouring from the front of the bus.

    Many of the bodies were badly charred, some of them piled in front of the unopened emergency exit, Taiwan’s top news agency CNA and other media reported.

    There was no official word on the cause of the fire, although CNA and others said that the bus apparently burst into flames after spinning out of control and smashing into the guard rail.

    CNA cited eyewitnesses as saying the bus had been giving off smoke and swerving from lane to lane prior to crashing and bursting into flames.

    The drivers of other vehicles pulled over and attempted to put out the flames with fire extinguishers, but the fire had grown too large for them to put out, the news agency said.

    Thirteen firefighting vehicles and 30 firefighters were sent to the scene, but the fire apparently spread too rapidly. By the time the flames were extinguished, the vehicle had been heavily blackened from one end to the other.

    The accident was the deadliest involving mainland visitors to Taiwan since the island opened up to mainland tourists in 2008, according to Taiwan authorities records and reports of previous incidents.

    Since then, 83 mainlanders have died while on trips to Taiwan, including yesterday’s victims. Several of those deaths involved bus crashes, including a 2010 crash that killed 19, and the latest accident is likely to revive safety concerns surrounding the treatment of tourists from the mainland, most of whom come on cheap group tours.

    (SD-Xinhua)