Road accident in Russia kills at least 10, including German citizens

Truck and bus collide in Russia; Germans among at least 10 dead¤

A truck slammed into a bus on a highway near St. Petersburg, leaving at least 10 people dead, including five German citizens, and injuring two dozen others.

The Volvo truck had moved into the oncoming lane and hit the bus before dawn in the Kurgan region in western Siberia, about 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) east of Moscow, Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said.

Six people died at the scene and four others died in a hospital, Beltsov said. Among the dead were five German citizens of Russian origin, including one of the three children killed, as well as one of the truck's two drivers and one of the two drivers aboard the bus, he said.

The Interfax news agency, citing unidentified hospital employees, said six of the dead were believed to be German citizens. It said the Germans aboard the bus were on their way to visit relatives in the city of Omsk.

Many ethnic Germans born in Russia have moved to Germany in the past two decades, and some return to Russia as tourists or to visit relatives.

The bus was traveling from Moscow to Novosibirsk, east of Omsk, with 36 people on board, Beltsov said. He said visibility was poor because of the fog but that the truck driver was at fault.

Interfax also reported that a German tourist was killed in a collision between a bus and a truck near St. Petersburg. A regional Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman, Andrei Alyabyev, confirmed that one person was killed and 15 others injured when a garbage truck and a bus carrying German tourists collided, but he did not know whether the victim was German.

The German Embassy in Moscow and regional consulates were trying to confirm the number of Germans killed and injured and establish their identities, the AP reports.