A senior Chinese mainland official in charge of Taiwan affairs called for more efforts Tuesday afternoon to save 18 Taiwanese tourists who were injured in a fatal traffic accident in northeast China's Jilin Province on Monday.

Sun Yafu, deputy director of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, urged local authorities to spare no efforts to save the injured people so that they could return to Taiwan safe and sound.

He gave the instruction when visiting the 18 injured people at a hospital affiliated to the government of the Korean Autonomous Prefecture of Yanbian in Jilin.

All of the injured Taiwanese tourists were transferred to the Yanbian hospital from a lower-level hospital on Tuesday to receive better treatment, said Wei Jiuping, director of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the prefecture.

Twelve out of the 18 people were injured seriously, including a couple who were transferred to the new hospital Tuesday morning and are still in danger, Wei said.

Wang Ying, head of the People's Hospital of Yanbian's Wangqing County, said 69-year-old Yen Wenhsiong suffered compound injures while his 60-year-old wife, Yang Suiying, suffered fractures.

Before the transfer, they had received treatment at the People's Hospital, where Yen had undergone surgery, Wang said.

The other 16 people were transferred to the Yanbian hospital Tuesday afternoon, Wei said.

A special medical taskforce is working to save the injured people, Wei said.

The traffic accident occurred at 9:40 a.m. on a highway in Wangqing County when a 20-member Taiwanese tourist group was traveling from Heilongjiang Province to Jilin. Their bus overturned and plunged into a river on the 51-km Laosong Highway.

Two Taiwanese women and the bus driver from the Chinese mainland were killed. The dead tourists were 66-year-old Lee Lin Ching-miao and Leu Hsiu-ching, 62. The other 18 tourists were all injured.

The tourist group was on the second leg of a ten-day tour through the three northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning.

(Xinhua News Agency September 13, 2006)