Three people have died after a jeep drove into a crowd and caught fire in Tiananmen Square on Monday, authorities said, blocking off a busy area in the heart of the Chinese capital.

Police said the crash happened around noon local time in front of the Tiananmen Rostrum, a structure that stands at the entrance to the Forbidden City bearing a giant portrait of Mao Zedong.

The dead are the driver of the jeep and two passengers, the Beijing police said in a statement. Eleven injured people, a mixture of tourists and police officers, have been taken to the hospital, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported.