Van Crash Outside Shanghai Starbucks Injures Over a Dozen

HONG KONG — A van slammed into pedestrians on a sidewalk outside a Starbucks in Shanghai on Friday, injuring at least 18 people, the Chinese state news media reported.

The crash occurred just before 9 a.m. local time on Nanjing Road West, near People’s Park in the heart of the city, according to the state-run Central China Television. Eighteen people were taken to the hospital, including three who were seriously injured, it said.

A witness told a reporter from The Paper, a local news outlet, that the van was carrying fuel canisters. The fire was extinguished quickly, The Paper reported, and it did not appear that any of the canisters had exploded.

Video posted online showed firefighters extinguishing flames from a gray van as injured people lay on the sidewalk.

Some local news reports disappeared from their websites shortly after they were published, an indication that government censors may have ordered them removed.

The initial reports on the crash of the burning van did not say whether the police were treating the incident as deliberate or accidental. But China has a history of aggrieved citizens using vehicles or explosions to vent their anger at the authorities, and the police in Shanghai were likely to examine whether the crash was intentional.

In 2013, five people died and dozens more were injured in downtown Beijing after a speeding vehicle bowled along a crowded sidewalk and burst into flames near the Forbidden City. In 2009, three people set themselves and their car on fire at Wangfujing, a shopping street just east of Tiananmen Square, in what was described as a protest over land seizures.

Starbucks is a major presence in China, where it has opened more than 500 locations a year, creating some 10,000 jobs in the country annually. There are at least 600 shops in Shanghai alone.