A traffic collision left six people dead and three others injured in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on Thursday, local authorities said.

A bus bumped into a truck on a desert highway near the Tarim Basin at about 1:30 PM on Thursday, local police said.

The people killed in the accident were all local farmers in a nearby Minfeng County, and the injured people were rushed to a hospital in the county immediately after the accident, police said.

Currently, two of the injured people are still being treated at the hospital.

The cause of the accident is being investigated.

The 522-km desert highway, built through moving sand dunes in 1993 and completed in 1995, is the longest of its kind in the world.

In another accident in northeast China's Liaoning Province, a traffic collision has left at least four people dead and 10 others injured on an expressway, local sources said on Thursday.

The accident took place at about 11 PM on Wednesday on the expressway near Jinzhou City, when a truck suddenly swerved and crashed into a sedan and a bus, the sources said.

The bus, carrying more than 20 people, caught fire immediately after the collision and was completely destroyed, sources said.

Two drivers of the bus and a passenger were killed on the spot and the other passenger managed to escape through a window.

Some of the injured people have been sent to the Jinzhou City Center Hospital.

A staff member who was on duty at the city's funeral home told Xinhua on Thursday that there were six bodies there.

But Liaoning Provincial Department of Public Security and Traffic Safety Administration officials refused to provide more details about the casualties for Xinhua, only saying that about three to four people died in the accident.

(Xinhua News Agency July 13, 2007)