Bodies of two Taiwanese tourists who were killed in Monday's bus accident in northeast China's Jilin Province were cremated on Friday morning in the city of Yanji in Jilin.

The victims were 66-year-old Lee Lin Ching-miao and 62-year-old Leu Hsiu-ching --- both female, and their bodies were cremated at a funeral home in Yanji, capital of the Korean Autonomous Prefecture of Yanbian.

Their bodies had been protected in frozen condition after the accident and the funeral affairs were arranged according to the local customs of Taiwan as wished by the victims' relatives, who arrived at Yanji on Tuesday night, said Wei Jiuping, head of the Taiwan Affairs Office of Yanbian prefecture.

The two victims were among the 20 Taiwanese tourists involved in a traffic accident that occurred at 9:40 a.m. on Monday on a highway in Wangqing County of Jilin when the tourist group was traveling from Heilongjiang Province to Jilin. Their bus overturned and plunged into a river along the 51-km Laosong Highway.

The bus driver from the Chinese mainland were also killed in the accident and the other 18 tourists were all injured.

Currently, 16 of them are receiving further medical treatment in Yanji and are all in stable condition, while two others, a male tourist Yen Wenhsiong, 69, and a female tourist Tseng Mingmei, 66, are now being treated in the Beijing-based China-Japan Friendship Hospital due to their critical condition, said Jin Chengmin, deputy director of Yanbian's health bureau.

Yen suffered serious chest injuries, fractures of the ribs and lung damage, and Tseng suffered from bleeding in the chest and had also breath problems. medical experts have said.

(Xinhua News Agency September 16, 2006)