China bus crash kills 15

ROUGH CUT (NO REPORTER NARRATION)

EDITORS NOTE: THIS EDIT CONTAINS CONVERTED 4:3 MATERIAL

Fifteen people were killed and six injured on Tuesday (March 14) when a bus plunged off a bridge into a deep ravine in a mountainous area of southwest China, state media reported.

The bus was carrying 21 people when it fell off the off the bridge in Aba Prefecture, a predominantly Tibetan area of China's southwest Sichuan province, around midday, CCTV said.

Nearly 200 police officers, firefighters and doctors and 10 ambulances were involved in the rescue effort, the China Daily newspaper reported a local government official as saying.

On Tuesday night, five of the six injured were in a critical condition in a nearby hospital, the paper reported.

The cause of accident was still under investigation, but an official said that the road conditions had been fine at the time it happened.