At least four Russian tourists were killed after their bus overturned in northern Greece on Friday, Russian officials said.

The bus was carrying 49 tourists from their hotel to the airport when it crashed on a highway near the country's second city, Thessaloniki, in the early hours of Friday morning.

The crash also injured some 30 Russian tourists, a diplomat at the Russian consulate in Thessaloniki said.

The Greek authorities are investigating the crash.

It is reported to be one of the country's worst traffic accidents in more than a decade.

Six Chinese maritime surveillance ships briefly entered waters around a group of islands at the center of a heated territorial dispute between Tokyo and Beijing, ignoring warnings from the Japanese authorities amid escalating tensions in the region.

The Chinese ships arrived near the uninhabited islands -- which Japan calls Senkaku and China calls Diaoyu -- on Friday morning and began patrols and "law enforcement," China's state-run news agency Xinhua reported.

The islands, situated in the East China Sea between Okinawa and Taiwan, are currently under Japanese control, but China claims they have been an "inherent" part of its territory "since ancient times." The long-running argument over who has sovereignty has resulted in occasionally violent acts of public protest.

The United States,a key ally of Japan, has repeatedly urged Tokyo and Beijing to resolve the dispute through dialogue. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will meet with his counterparts in Japan and China during a visit to the region that begins this weekend, the Department of Defense said Thursday.

The Chinese ships entered Japanese territorial waters Friday despite warnings from the Japanese Coast Guard, said Shinichi Gega, a spokesman for Japan's 11th Regional Coast Guard Headquarters.

The vessels had all left the waters by mid-afternoon and headed north, the Japanese Coast Guard said later Friday, noting that sea in the area was getting rough as a huge storm, Super Typhoon Sanba, approached from the south.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura said Japan would intensify its own patrols of the area in response to what he described as an "unprecedented scale of invasion" of Japanese waters.

See a map of Asia's disputed islands

Tokyo has protested the "inappropriate, illegal act" to the Chinese authorities, Fujimura said.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said Japan would "take all possible measures to ensure security" around the islands.

Two of the Chinese ships responded to a Japanese Coast Guard vessel's warning by reiterating China's territorial claim to the islands and saying they were carrying out patrol work, according to Gega. Japanese ships and helicopters are continuing their own patrols of the area, he said.

The controversial Chinese move to begin patrols around the islands follows the Japanese government's purchase of several of the islands from a private Japanese owner earlier this week, a deal that China described as "illegal and invalid."

Read about China's warning of economic fallout

The purpose of the patrols is "to demonstrate China's jurisdiction over the Diaoyu Islands and its affiliated islets and ensure the country's maritime interests," Xinhua reported Friday, citing a government statement.

This week, China announced what it said were the boundaries of its territorial waters around the islands to back up its claim of sovereignty. It said it had filed a copy of the announcement with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday to comply with international law.

But Fujimura insisted Friday that the islands are an "integral part of Japanese territory" under international law, highlighting how directly opposed the two sides are.

Animosity between the two countries over the islands runs deep.

They have come to represent what many Chinese people see as unfinished business: redressing the impact of the Japanese occupation of large swathes of eastern China during the 1930s and 1940s.

China says its claim goes back hundreds of years. Japan says it saw no trace of Chinese control of the islands in an 1885 survey, so formally recognized them as Japanese sovereign territory in 1895.

Japan then sold the islands in 1932 to descendants of the original settlers. The Japanese surrender at the end of World War II in 1945 only served to cloud the issue further.

The islands were administered by the U.S. occupation force after the war. But in 1972, Washington returned them to Japan as part of its withdrawal from Okinawa.

Tokyo's diplomatic corps suffered an unexpected setback Thursday when the newly appointed Japanese ambassador to China, Shinichi Nishimiya, collapsed in Tokyo and was hospitalized just two days after he was named to the post.

 A British girl who survived the execution-style killing of her father, mother and grandmother in a normally idyllic region of the Alps last week left France on Friday, authorities said.

Zainab al-Hilli, 7, left in the morning, French national police said. They did not say where she was going.

As the only survivor, she is a key witness who potentially saw who carried out the shooting, according to the French prosecutor leading the investigation.

She spent several days in a medically-induced coma, and as of Wednesday, she remained too badly injured to be questioned, Eric Maillaud said.

She was beaten and shot in the attack, and rescued by a British cyclist who came upon the scene on September 5.

In an interview with BBC News, he recounted the shocking scene he stumbled across as he went on a regular bike ride in a national park.The cyclist, former Royal air force pilot Brett Martin, helped the injured girl and called for help.

Martin said what he found in the parking lot -- three people shot dead in a car and a fourth on the ground nearby -- was like "a Hollywood scene."

His account came as French prosecutor Maillaud and investigating Judge Michel Mollin were in Britain seeking new leads in the case.

They met with Surrey Police, whose officers have been helping French investigators to search the home of two of the victims, Saad and Ikbal al-Hilli, in Claygate town, Surrey county.

Bomb squad clears suspicious items in victims' home

Maillaud said it was "highly likely that the reasons and causes for (the crime) have their origin in this country."

"Our presence here does not mean that there are problems between the two jurisdictions," Maillaud said.

"We wish to reinforce our cooperation and understanding with hope to reach a conclusion to these horrible murders."

Surrey Police will do all they can to assist the French-led investigation, said Rob Price, the assistant chief constable.

Maillaud said Wednesday that investigators were focused on three main areas: Saad al-Hilli's job, his links to his native Iraq, and a reported family dispute over money involving his brother.

Born in Baghdad in 1962, Saad al-Hilli was a naturalized British citizen who had lived in the United Kingdom for decades. He was an engineer working at Surrey Satellite Technology, a high-tech company owned by EADS, an aerospace corporation that builds satellites.

Authorities have been tight-lipped about possible perpetrators and motives in the attack, although speculation has been rife in the British media.

Martin's account to the BBC shed fresh light on the grisly scene that confronted French police near Lake Annecy after the alarm was raised last Wednesday.

'Slaughter at Chevaline': More questions than answers

The first thing he saw as he cycled up the mountain road near the village of Chevaline was the bike of a French cyclist on the ground, Martin said.

Then he spotted the wounded girl, whose parents and grandmother were subsequently identified as those shot to death in the car.

She was stumbling and falling over and at first he thought she was playing, Martin told the BBC. Then he realized she was injured, and put her in the recovery position as she slipped in and out of consciousness.

The car engine was still revving and wheels spinning, he said, making him fear it could move and harm the girl and the cyclist whose bike he had seen on the ground.

"At first I thought, there's been a terrible accident between a cyclist and a car, because there was a cyclist on the ground more or less in front of the car. But there were things that didn't quite match, because the cyclist's bike wasn't beside him, so as the minutes went on I started to change my opinion," he told the BBC.

He pushed in one of the car windows, which had bullet holes in it, to turn off the engine -- and saw the bodies inside.

"I've never seen people who've been shot before for real ... but it seemed to me just like a Hollywood scene, and if someone had said 'cut' and everybody got up and walked away, that would have been it. But unfortunately it was real life. ... It became quite obvious now, taking stock, that it was a gun crime," he said.

Realizing that whoever was responsible could still be in the area, Martin became increasingly anxious but faced a dilemma.

He had no cell phone signal to call emergency services, but the girl appeared too badly injured for him to carry her down the mountain. Martin decided to leave her in a safe position and set off back down the road on his bike to summon help.

He managed to flag down a car and asked the French motorist to call for help, before returning to the scene to check on the girl, who was now unconscious.

He added that he was not surprised that French police had failed to spot a second child, a 4-year-old girl, hiding in the back of the car under her dead mother's legs, for nearly eight hours.

The girl, who has been reunited with other family members, told investigators she heard noise but saw nothing.

Young girl found alive among bodies in France

Martin, from Sussex in southern England, went back to France on Wednesday to retrace his route and see if new recollections came to mind.

The pilot, who now works in civil aviation and has a family business in Annecy, had given a detailed statement to police immediately after the shooting, including details of vehicles that passed him on the road, he said.

The eruption of a volcano in Guatemala was diminishing Friday, emergency officials said, though a heightened alert for the communities near the Volcan de Fuego remained in place.

As many as 35,000 residents had been evacuated because of the columns of ash and smoke that spewed from the "Fire Volcano," the Red Cross of Guatemala said.

The country's emergency management agency said the volcano's flow and ash had reduced since the beginning of the eruption. A government photo of Volcan de Fuego showed a massive wall of smoke that was lighter in color from where it rose into the sky, and dark gray as it drifted.

The average height of the column of smoke had decreased from about 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) to 700 meters, the agency said.

Still, civil protection authorities kept a heightened "orange" alert in place.

The volcano began spewing ash at 10 a.m. and was continuing to belch late in the afternoon near the country's former capital, Antigua, said Carmen Maria Caballero of the Guatemalan Red Cross.

CNN iReporter Harby David Marroquin had been working at a nearby golf course when he saw nature's pyrotechnics and shot video on his iPhone. It showed white smoke pouring out of the top of the 3,763-meter (12,346-foot) volcano.

Listening to the volcano gives him peace of mind, Marroquin said. "You feel an indescribable energy, and this time was no different."

Ten shelters, each able to house about 200 people, were opened in the affected villages, Caballero said. Most evacuees were staying with friends or relatives, she said.

Residents within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the volcano were being taken from the affected zone in buses and private cars, she said. Ash was falling up to 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the volcano.

Several people were treated at mobile health centers for respiratory problems; one person was hospitalized in critical condition, according to Caballero.

Another Red Cross spokesman, Vinicio Sarazua Santillan, told CNN en Espanol that a number of people were remaining in their houses, unwilling to evacuate out of fear that their belongings could be stolen.

Thursday's eruption marked the sixth -- and the strongest -- this year, Caballero said. "It's a very active volcano," she added, but said that did not necessarily mean Thursday's eruption would last longer than others.

According to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the volcano is one of Central America's most active.

Volcano erupts in another Central American country

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A huge typhoon packing fierce winds is moving north toward the Japanese island of Okinawa and is projected to eventually hit the Korean Peninsula, where dozens of people were killed by a big storm last month.

The tropical cyclone headed for Okinawa is named Sanba and is currently classed as a super typhoon, with maximum sustained winds near its center of 210 kilometers per hour (130 mph), according to the Hong Kong Observatory, which monitors typhoons in the region.

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