Two people drowned when their vehicle was one of eight cars to plunge through a thin layer of ice on Lake Baikal in Siberia, a spokesman for authorities in Irkutsk city said Sunday. The occupants of the other vehicles were able to escape from their sinking cars, the spokesman added. Rescue teams including three divers were working at the scene of the accident, which occurred Saturday, on the western part of the lake, dpa reported. Fishermen had driven their cars out onto the lake, they said. The ice on the world's deepest lake, which is 5,000 kilometres east of Moscow, was too thin to carry the weight of cars after the unusually mild winter, disaster control services warned.
