A bus fire in Kazakhstan killed 52 people yesterday in a vast snow-covered steppe, officials said.
The tragedy happened near the village of Kalybai in the northern Aktobe region, the Emergencies Department of the former Soviet nation in Central Asia said. Authorities said that only five of 57 people on the bus managed to escape the blaze. They are being treated for injuries.
Officials said that according to preliminary information all of the victims were citizens of neighbouring Uzbekistan. Of the survivors, two are citizens of Kazakhstan who were taking turns to drive the bus and three others are from Uzbekistan.
The bus was travelling along a road in Kazakhstan's north-western Aktau region that links the Russian city of Samara to Shymkent, a city in southern Kazakhstan close to the Uzbek border.
It was unclear in which direction the bus had been travelling, but the route is widely used to transport Uzbek migrant workers to and from Russia where they often take on work on building sites.
