A passenger bus careened off a mountain road in Peru and plunged 50 meters into a jungle river, killing 52 people and injuring 15 others, police said.

The accident occurred Sunday in the Andean jungle, 346 kilometers northeast of the capital, officer Juan Siu Gomez said Monday via telephone from Aguaytia, near the crash site.

The bus was traveling from Lima to the jungle town of Pucallpa, about 483 kilometers to the northeast when it crashed, police said. There were no foreign passengers on board.

Police Captain Omar Martin said from Pucallpa that the number of dead reached 49 after rescue workers pulled victims from the bus, which was submerged in the Yurac River. But police announced Tuesday that the death toll rose to 52. The dead included four children.

Peru's leading daily newspaper, El Comercio, reported that survivors told authorities the driver lost control of the bus in a heavy rainstorm while speeding across a bridge over the river.

Bus crashes are common in Peru, where drivers frequently speed and pass vehicles along blind mountain curves.

In November, a passenger bus plunged almost 152 meters off a mountain highway in the southern Andes, killing 17 people.

Five days earlier, a passenger bus plunged more than 198 meters off an isolated mountain highway in the Andes, killing at least 28 people and injuring 28 others.

A recent study commissioned by Peru's Transportation Ministry showed that between January and July of this year, 208 people were killed in rural bus crashes, compared with 170 deaths in the same time period in 2003.

Another recent study by Peru's Health Ministry showed that between 1990 and 2000, 31,555 people were killed and 210,313 were injured in accidents on Peru's roads.

(China Daily, Xinhua News Agency December 22, 2004)