Accidents claim 23 lives on highway and offshore

At least 11 people died and 19 others were injured in a traffic accident on the Shenyang-Haikou Highway in Jiangsu province on Sunday morning.

In another accident, 12 crew members from a fishing vessel registered in Jiangsu also died on Sunday morning when it capsized off Zhoushan in neighboring Zhejiang province.

The traffic accident, on the highway's Yancheng section, happened at around 1 am, when a truck went through a guardrail in the middle of the road and crashed into a bus, which overturned. That caused a rear-end collision involving two other trucks.

The dead included seven people from the bus, two from the truck that crashed into it, and two from the trucks involved in the rear-end collision.

All the injured have been sent to local hospitals to receive treatment.

Traffic on the highway did not return to normal until 9 am, according to the official Chinahighway.com website. Cleanup work at the site of the accident was completed by noon.

The Ministry of Public Security has dispatched a working team to the spot to conduct an investigation.

Lou Qinjian, Party secretary of Jiangsu, visited patients receiving treatment in hospital and said the government will spare no effort in caring for them.

"The most important work now is to care for the injured," Xinhua Daily quoted Lou as saying. "The health commissions of the province and the city must send their most professional experts to care for them."

Wu Zhenglong, Jiangsu's governor, has arrived in Yancheng to organize the treatment of the injured and investigate the accident.

According to a preliminary investigation, the bus, which belonged to Shanghai Xindadu Passenger Transport, was traveling between Shanghai and Guanyun county in Lianyungang, Jiangsu.

It had all the necessary vehicle qualification certificates and the truck that hit it, which came from Liaoning province, was not overloaded.

The reason the truck crashed through the guardrail has yet to be established, the Yancheng public security bureau said.

On many highways in China, trucks should observe a 90 kilometer per hour speed limit.

Maritime authorities in Zhejiang are sparing no efforts in searching for four missing crew members from the fishing vessel, local authorities said.

Twelve people died after the Suqiyu03434 capsized and four others remained missing by 3 pm Sunday, the provincial maritime search and rescue center said.

It received a report at 4:28 am that the vessel had capsized about 100 nautical miles east of Zhujiajian Island in Zhoushan. The Zhejiang Provincial Emergency Management Bureau confirmed later that there were 20 people onboard.

Four crew members have been rescued and 12 bodies recovered.

As of 1 pm Sunday, 10 maritime search and rescue ships, one helicopter and one fixed-wing plane had been dispatched to the area where the vessel capsized, with another 20 ships nearby joining the search and rescue efforts.

Xinhua contributed to this story.