Video: 18 injured as vehicle ploughs into pedestrians in Shanghai

The vehicle mounted on the pavement in the busy part of Central Shanghai.

Eighteen people were injured on Friday, three seriously, after a vehicle mounted the pavement in a busy part of central Shanghai and ploughed into pedestrians, the city government said.  
The Shanghai government said in a short statement the vehicle hit the pedestrians on a road running next to People's Square, injuring 18 people, three of them seriously. 
 
The vehicle was on fire, the statement added, without saying if the fire happened before the incident occurred. 

#BREAKING 18 hospitalized after a car hits pedestrians in #Shanghai's Huangpu District on Friday morning; cause of the incident under investigation pic.twitter.com/wsgDTmZaCW
- CGTN (@CGTNOfficial) February 2, 2018

The flames had since been extinguished and an investigation was underway, the government said, without elaborating. 
Shanghai-based news portal The Paper said the vehicle was a minivan, and cited eyewitnesses as saying it was on fire as it drove onto the pavement, knocked people down and came to a stop in front of a Starbucks outlet. 
Some bystanders tried to break the window of the vehicle and drag out the six people in the vehicle, including the driver, the report said. 
Other witnesses told the news outlet that there were gas cylinders in the vehicle. 

The story was later removed from the new outlet's website and replaced with the Shanghai government's short statement on the incident.
ootage on Chinese social media, which Reuters could not independently verify, showed smoke coming out from the vehicle and people lying flat on the ground injured in the street.