HAVANA, Nov 6 (Reuters) - Fifty-six people were killed and six were injured on Thursday when a passenger train slammed into a bus on a level crossing in eastern Cuba, state media said.
The state news agency AIN said the crash, which equalled Cuba's worst rail disaster to date, occurred near the town of San German, some 450 miles (720 km) southeast of Havana, in Holguin province.
The accident involved a 12-coach passenger train travelling from Havana to the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba. AIN said the driver of the bus, who died in the crash, failed to stop at the junction at the village of Crucero del Rey as the train was passing through.
AIN said most of the dead were from the nearby town of Urbano Noris -- indicating that most of those killed were travelling on the bus and not the train. However the agency did not specify this.
AIN also said the bus was a school bus, but it did not say if those travelling on it were children.
All six of the injured were in a critical state, the news agency said.
Local officials quickly went to the scene, headed by Gen Ramon Espinoza Martin, head of the eastern army, it said. The Interior Ministry was investigating the cause of the crash, AIN said.
The death toll equalled that of Cuba's worst train crash, an accident in 1991 when a passenger train derailed in central Villa Clara province, killing 56 people.
In a rail crash in February this year, 18 people were killed in a collision between a passenger train and a goods locomotive in central Cuba.
In August, a Cuban court sentenced four railway workers to 11 years jail after finding them responsible for the February crash. Those jailed were found guilty of drunk driving and permitting drunk driving.
REUTERS
22:58 11-06-97