Eleven staff from a Bangkok elementary school were killed when their passenger van flipped over and caught fire after a tyre burst on the Chon Buri-Bangkok Motorway.
The van carrying 15 people from the Koom Klao Scholar School in Minburi was returning to Bangkok from a seminar in Rayong when the accident took place around 9pm Friday in Muang district of Chon Buri.
"The van's tyre burst and it turned over before catching on fire," an official from the Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Department told AFP.
Photos published in local media showed the overturned vehicle engulfed in flames on the side of the road.
Four people survived the accident with injuries, the disaster official said. A school employee told AFP the school's director was driving the vehicle and was among the injured.
Despite relatively good infrastructure, Thailand has the second most dangerous roads in the world in terms of per-capita deaths, according to data collected by the World Health Organization (WHO) in a 2015 report.
The WHO estimates about 24,000 people die each year in traffic accidents on Thailand's roads. Only Libya records a greater number of fatalities per capita.