VIENNA, Aug 10 (AFP) - Five people were killed and 42 injured when a tourist bus carrying 48 passengers, most of them British, crashed Tuesday in Austria, national television reported.
The accident happened at 4:30 pm (1430 GMT) when the bus was overtaken by another vehicle and veered off the road into a ditch before somersaulting, according to an earlier radio report.
Several passengers were flung through the bus windows as it careened 20 -metres (yards) down into a ditch along the road, the radio said.
Four people died at the crash scene, while a fifth was airlifted towards a hospital in Salzburg but died in transit, according to the head of the emergency services, Gerhard Huber.
Twenty passengers were seriously hurt in the accident, which happened in Duerrnberg, near Salzburg in the west of the country, while seven were in a critical condition, Huber said.
"The death toll could still rise," he warned.
Huber said the bus was carrying 43 British passengers, two Germans and two Russians, as well as the Austrian driver, but he was unable to give the identity of the victims.
The radio report said the Germans and Russians were among the "victims" but did not give a breakdown of the nationalities of the dead and injured.
A major rescue operation, involving 135 firemen and 100 other people, was mounted and several helicopters were sent to the scene of the accident.
"It is like a battlefield," said the pilot of one of the helicopters sent to evacuate the wounded from the crash scene, quoted by the Austrian agency APA.
The bus belongs to a company in the nearby village of Sankt Wolfgang and is used for tourist excursions.