"BBC": 12 pupils died in crash of school bus in China.

12 students were killed when a school bus overturned into a frozen river at about 6pm yesterday in Fengxian County in the city of Xuzhou in east China's Jiangsu Province.

There were 46 people on board the bus which had a capacity of 52, a spokesman with the Xuzhou government said. 

Eleven people were injured in the crash, three of them seriously. It was not known whether they were adults or children. 

Some of the injured were sent to nearby hospitals, while others had to be rescued from the freezing waters of the one-meter deep river. 

The bus belonged to the primary school of Zhanghoutun Village in Fengxian, the spokesman said.

The driver of the bus fled the scene immediately after the bus overturned, villagers from a nearby village told the Jiangsu-based Modern Express newspaper.

According to a preliminary investigation, the bus was trying to avoid hitting a pedestrian when the accident happened. The exact cause of the accident is still under investigation. 

In the wake of previous tragic road accidents, the Chinese government proposed new laws to ensure the safety of school buses. 

While its efforts have met with some praise from the public, many have called for more to be done to ward against such tragedies, Xinhua news agency reported. 

A draft regulation on school bus safety was made public on Sunday by the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council.

China began nationwide school bus safety checks and pledged increased spending on school buses in the wake of one horrific accident that stirred public concern over safety.

Twenty-one people, including 19 preschoolers and two adults, died, and 43 others were injured last month when a nine-seater school bus illegally carrying 64 people collided head-on with a truck in northwest Gansu Province in foggy conditions.

Several days after the accident, Premier Wen Jiabao called on relevant government departments to "rapidly" create safety regulations and standards for the country's school buses while further improving the design, production and distribution of vehicles.

The accident revealed problems in the country's school bus management, including regulatory loopholes, unimplemented safety measures and a failure to carry out government responsibilities, according to a statement by the State Council's Work Safety Committee.

Of the 285,000 school buses throughout the country, only 10 percent of vehicles conform to a set of technical standards for school buses for primary school students that the government issued last year, according to Xinhua.