Thirteen people were killed and three others injured when an overloaded minivan hit a truck on an expressway in central China, according to the traffic management bureau of the Ministry of Public Security.
The collision occurred at about 2:40 a.m. on the G40 expressway in Nanyang, a city in Henan province. The bureau said the minivan struck the rear of a semi-trailer truck that was travelling ahead of it.
All 16 people in the minivan were affected. The vehicle was designed to carry no more than nine passengers, meaning it had seven occupants above its stated capacity when the crash happened. The available account did not identify the people who died or provide details about the condition of the three injured people.
China's public security ministry said it treated the incident as a serious matter and sent a team to Nanyang to oversee the investigation. The group was led by an official from the ministry's traffic management bureau. No preliminary cause beyond the circumstances of the rear-end collision was disclosed, and the evidence did not say whether anyone in the truck was injured.
The crash combines two issues investigators are likely to examine separately: how the collision occurred on the expressway and why the minivan was operating with substantially more occupants than its permitted capacity. The source account did not report whether the vehicle was providing a commercial passenger service, nor did it identify its operator.
The G40 is the Shanghai–Xi'an Expressway, a major east-west road crossing Henan. The incident happened during the early hours, but authorities had not released information about weather, visibility, traffic conditions or the speed of either vehicle in the evidence supplied for this report. Those factors therefore remain undetermined.
The ministry's deployment of an investigative team indicated that central authorities were taking a direct role in the response. Traffic police had not announced findings, possible violations or enforcement action at the time reflected in the available report.
The crash was reported as a collision involving a minivan, rather than a full-size passenger bus. That distinction matters when considering the scale of the overload: 16 occupants were inside a vehicle certified for nine. The evidence does not indicate how those occupants were seated or whether restraints were available and used.\n\nThe confirmed toll was 13 dead and three injured. Further official information would be needed to establish the sequence of events, responsibility for the overload and whether mechanical or road conditions contributed to the collision.
