Bus inferno in Kazakhstan kills 52

ASTANA, Kazakhstan — Fifty-two people were killed on Thursday when the bus they were traveling on caught fire, the central Asian nation’s emergency services ministry said in a statement.

“On Jan 18 at 10:30 am, a bus caught fire, ... 55 passengers and two drivers were on board. Five people who managed to escape are receiving medical assistance. The rest died on the spot,” the ministry said, without elaborating on the cause of the blaze.

The bus driver said the passengers were Uzbek nationals while the vehicle was registered in Kazakhstan, said emergency services ministry official Ruslan Imankulov.

He said the fire spread through the bus very quick.

Video broadcast by Russian and Kazakh media showed black smoke and flames billowing from the vehicle on a flat stretch of road carving through a snowy steppe.

Emergency service officials initially blamed the fire on a short circuit and said the bus was overloaded, Interfax-Kazakstan news agency reported.

The ministry named the vehicle as a Hungarian-made Ikarus. These buses are still widely used in ex-Soviet nations, even though they are often decades old.

The bus was headed from the Russian city of Samara on the Volga river to the town of Shymkent in southern Kazakhstan, the ministry said.