Fourteen people died and four were injured Thursday when a Moscow-bound bus burst into flames after colliding with a truck in the Vladimir region, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.

Rescue workers used a crane to peel the blackened roof from the twisted metal frame of the Neoplan bus on the M-7 highway on the outskirts of Petushki, a small town located about 100 kilometers east of Moscow, television pictures showed.

The bus was carrying 30 people, many of them traders from the Volga city of Ulyanovsk who were headed for Moscow's Luzhniki market, Itar-Tass reported. The KamAZ truck was heading in the opposite direction to the city of Vladimir.

"According to our latest information, 14 people died -- the driver of the truck and 13 people on the bus," Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Lyudmila Martynova said.

Casualty numbers could change because of the difficulty of identifying remains from the charred bus, she said. News reports earlier said 25 people had died in the accident.

Traffic police said the truck driver might have fallen asleep at the wheel. The accident occurred at about 1:20 a.m.

"The section of road where the accident occurred is straight and properly illuminated, and the surface of the road was dry at the moment of the tragedy," a local traffic police source told RIA-Novosti.

Other officials said one of the truck's tires had blown out.

Russia's overloaded roads are treacherous, with many drivers giving scant attention to even basic traffic safety rules. About 30,000 people died in Russian road accidents last year.

(Reuters, MT)