DUBAI, Oct 20: A passenger bus in southwestern Iran overturned on Friday evening, killing 26 girl students on board, Iranian media reported on Saturday.

Eighteen others were injured when the bus, carrying students from the town of Borujen, flipped on the Izeh-Lordegan road, about 700km southwest of the capital Tehran, Iranian media reported.

“Travelling at excess speeds on slippery roads was the cause of this accident,” Col Samad Esfandiari, a highway patrol official, told the Iranian Students’ News Agency.

The injured were taken to various hospitals in southwest Iran for treatment, state television said. Traffic accidents kill nearly 28,000 people and injure or disable 300,000 people a year in Iran, a country of 75 million people, according to statistics from Unicef.—Reuters