Twenty Myanmar migrant workers died early Friday as fire tore through a bus taking them from a Thai border town to Bangkok, officials said.<\/p>\n
It was not immediately clear how the blaze started on the bus — one of four travelling together to the Thai capital.<\/p>\n
But television footage showed a bus destroyed by fire which trapped many passengers inside.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe death toll is now 20, with three people injured,\u201d Pollawat Sapsongsuk of the Tak Disaster Prevention and Mitigation centre told AFP.<\/p>\n
Kittisak Boonchan, a rescue worker in Tak province, told reporters there were 47 people on the bus.<\/p>\n
The accident took place at 1:25am in the northwestern province of Tak which borders Myanmar, a source of much of Thailand\u2019s huge migrant labour force.<\/p>\n
Low status and poorly paid, migrant workers often fall victim to safety lapses and exploitation in Thailand.<\/p>\n
The kingdom has a poor road safety record on crashes with around 24,000 people perishing on its roads each year, according to the World Health Organization.<\/p>\n
Last week 18 people died when a bus veered of the road and smashed into a tree in the northeast of the country.<\/p>\n
The driver of that bus later confessed to being on drugs at the time of the crash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Twenty Myanmar migrant workers died early Friday as fire tore through a bus taking them from a Thai border town to Bangkok, officials said. It was not immediately clear how the blaze started on the bus — one of four travelling together to the Thai capital. But television footage showed a bus destroyed by fire […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26401,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26402,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26400\/revisions\/26402"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}