In brief: Two accidents leave 47 dead in China

BEIJING – A double-decker bus rammed into a tanker loaded with highly flammable methanol on a northern Chinese highway, causing both vehicles to burst into flames in one of two serious accidents that left 47 dead over the weekend.

The official Xinhua News Agency said 39 people were on the long-distance sleeper bus when it crashed and only three survived.

The tanker had just returned to the highway after a rest stop when it was apparently rear-ended by the bus at around 2:40 a.m. Sunday close to the city of Yan’an in Shaanxi province, the official China News website said.

The bus had left Hohhot in Inner Mongolia and was headed south to Xi’an city, it said.

In the second accident, 11 people were killed and another was seriously hurt when a van crashed into a truck Sunday afternoon in southwest China’s Sichuan province, Xinhua reported.

Road safety is a serious problem in China. According to Xinhua, poorly maintained roads and bad driving habits result in about 70,000 deaths and 300,000 injuries a year.

Shooting of U.S. car called mistake

MEXICO CITY – The attorney for two of the Mexican federal police officers detained in the shooting of a U.S. Embassy vehicle that wounded two U.S. government employees said his clients have formally declared that the incident was not an ambush but an accident occurring during the pursuit of suspected criminals.

Officials from both nations have said federal officers were chasing criminals Friday on a highway south of Mexico City when bullets were fired at the embassy sport utility vehicle carrying the two employees and a Mexican Navy captain. The U.S. Embassy characterized the incident as an “ambush.”

But attorney Ricardo Monterroso Cisneros told the Associated Press on Sunday that “there was no ambush.” Monterroso is attorney for Rafael Rivera Cordoba and Jorge Alberto Vargas Camacho, among a dozen federal police officers detained.