Picture used for illustrative purposes only.

A bus crash killed 27 people and injured a further 20 when the vehicle rolled over on a highway in southwest China's mountainous Guizhou province, local police said in a statement on Sunday.

The accident took place in the early hours of Sunday morning in Sandu county, around 170km (105 miles) southeast of the provincial capital, Guiyang, police said.

The bus was carrying 47 people and the 20 injured were being treated on Sunday, police added.

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The other 20 people were being treated for injuries and emergency responders were dispatched to the scene, police said, without providing any more details.

The accident happened in Qiannan prefecture — a poor, remote and mountainous part of Guizhou, home to several ethnic minorities.

Earlier, two social media posts by the China Road Network monitoring service, that have since been deleted, said the accident occurred at around 2:40am (1840 GMT on Saturday), according to screenshots circulating on the Twitter-like Weibo.

Social media users angrily demanded why a passenger bus was travelling down a highway in the early hours of the morning, when many major roads in the province have been closed to regular traffic.

One hundred toll stations are shuttered in Guizhou because of Covid-19 restrictions and long-distance passenger journeys across China are banned from running between 2am and 5am.

Guizhou is in the midst of a Covid outbreak that has seen more than 900 new infections in the past two days alone.

Its provincial capital Guiyang, home to six million residents, was locked down earlier in September.

The bus was travelling south in the direction of Guiyang to Libo county, according to the police statement.