DHAKA - A passenger bus fell in to a river on the outskirts of Bangladesh's capital Dhaka Tuesday morning, leaving five people dead and 19 others missing, fire service officials said.

Shafiullah Sarkar Deedar, the fire service official on the scene, told Xinhua that the passenger bus fell into the Turag river at Ashuria on the outskirts of Dhaka after colliding head-on with another bus coming from opposition direction at round 9 am local time.

Deedar said frogmen have so far dragged five bodies from inside the bus and the rescue operation is going on as 19 people were still missing.

He feared that the death toll might go up.  

The South Asian nation has one of the highest fatality rates for road accidents in the world mainly due to shoddy highways, poorly maintained vehicles, violation of traffic rules by inept drivers and lack of monitoring of the traffic department.