A bus carrying workers after shifts collided with a train on Friday in southern Russia, killing 22 people and injuring four more, emergency officials and prosecutors said.

The bus carrying at least 26 workers from the Kontsentrat factory slammed into a train at an unguarded railway crossing in the Ust-Labinsky district of the Krasnodar region, some 1,200 km south of Moscow, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.

All the victims were on the bus, which was badly damaged. The train's locomotive was derailed. The accident occurred under heavy fog.

"Preliminary reports indicate that the driver of the bus failed to stop at the crossing to let the train pass. The bus was carrying factory workers to the village of Voronezhskaya," a spokesman for the Prosecutor General's Office told the Interfax news agency.

Interfax previously reported that the 17 school children were killed in the accident.

(Xinhua News Agency January 14, 2006)