More than 150 killed when fuel truck explodes
People had rushed to the scene to gather leaking oil.
BAHAWALPUR, PAKISTAN — Alerted by an announcement over a mosque’s loudspeaker
that an overturned tanker truck had sprung a leak,
scores of villagers raced to the scene with fuel contain- ers Sunday to gather the oil. Then the wreck exploded, engulfing people in flames as they screamed in terror.
At least 153 men, women and children were killed, with dozens more in criti- cal condition, hospital and rescue officials said.
“I have never seen anything like it in my life. Victims trapped in the fireball. They were screaming for help,” said Abdul Malik, a police
officer who was among the first to arrive on the scene of horror in Pakistan’s Punjab province.
When the flames subsided, he said, “we saw bod- ies everywhere. So many were just skeletons. The peo- ple who were alive were in really bad shape.”
About 30 motorcycles that villagers had used to rush to the site of the highway accident lay charred nearby
along with cars, witnesses said. Local news channels showed black smoke billowing skyward and army helicopters taking away the injured.
As victims cried out for help, residents wandered
through the area, looking for loved ones.
Zulkha Bibi searched for her two sons.
“Someone should tell me about my beloved sons. Where are they? Are they alive or are they no longer in this world? Please tell me,” she pleaded.
Many of the dead were burned beyond recognition, said Dr. Mohammad Baqar, a senior rescue official in the area. They will have to be identified through DNA.
The disaster came on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. While Saudi Arabia and most other Muslim countries celebrated the hol- iday Sunday, Pakistanis will mark it today.
The fuel truck was travel- ing from the southern port city of Karachi to Lahore, the Punjab provincial capi- tal, when the driver lost con- trol and crashed on a high- way outside Bahawalpur.
A loudspeaker atop a mosque alerted villagers to the leaking fuel, and many
rushed to the scene with fuel containers, said Rana Mohammad Salim, deputy
commissioner of Bahawalpur.
Highway police moved quickly to redirect traffic but couldn’t stop the scores of villagers, spokesman Imran Shah said.
When the fire erupted, the same mosque loudspeaker called on the remaining villagers to help put it out.
Mohammed Salim said he ran toward the smoke with buckets of water and sand, but the heat was too intense.
“I co u ld hear people screaming, but I couldn’t get to them,” he said.
Dr. Javed Iqbal at Baha- walpur’s Victoria Hospital said most of the patients suffered burns to upward of 80 percent of their bodies. Many were evacuated by plane or helicopter to hos
pitals in the Punjab cities of Lahore and Multan.
Scores of villagers in Pakistan’s Punjab province were at the scene gathering oil from the overturned tanker truck when it exploded.
One late WASHINGTON — afternoon in April, helicopter-borne American commandos intercepted a vehicle in southeastern Syria carrying a close associate of the Islamic State’s supreme leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The associate, Abdurakhmon Uzbeki, was a rare prize whom U.S. Special Oper- ations forces had been tracking for months: a midlevel but highly trusted operative skilled in raising money; spir- iting insurgent leaders out of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s besieged capital in Syria; and plotting attacks against
the West. Captured alive, Uzbeki could be an intelligence bonanza. Federal prosecutors had already begun preparing criminal charges against him for possible pros- ecution in the United States.
As the commandos swooped in, however, a fire- fight broke out. Uzbeki, a
combat-hardened veteran of shadow wars in Syria and Pakistan, died in the gunbattle, thwarting the mili- tary’s hopes of extracting from him any information about Islamic State opera
tions, leaders and strategy. New details about the oper- ation, and a similar episode in January that sought to seize
another midlevel Islamic State operative, offer a rare glimpse into the handful of highly classified and increas- ingly risky commando raids of the secretive, nearly threeyear U.S. ground war against
the Islamic State. Cellphones and other material swept up by Special Operations forces proved valuable for future raids, though the missions fell short of their goal to capture, not kill, terrorist lead- ers in order to obtain fresh, firsthand information about the inner circle and war coun- cil of the group, also known as ISIS.
“If we can scoop some- body up alive, with their cell- phones and diaries, it really can help speed up the demise of a terrorist group like ISIS,” said Dell L. Dailey, a retired commander of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command and the chairman of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.
U.S. military and intelligence officials caution that the Islamic State is far from defeated, particularly with a sophisticated propaganda apparatus that continues to inspire and, in some cases, enable its global following to carry out attacks. But in the self-proclaimed caliph- ate across swaths of Iraq and Syria, the terrorist group’s last two major strongholds are under siege, many senior leaders have fled south to the
Euphrates River Valley, and its legions of foreign fight- ers are battling to the death or slipping away, possibly to wreak havoc in Europe.
T he race to drive the jihadis out of eastern Syria, where they have held sway for three years, has gained new urgency as rival forces converge on ungoverned parts of the region. Syrian forces and Iranian-backed militias that support them are advancing east, closer to U.S.-backed fighters battling to reclaim Raqqa. Russia threatened on Monday to target American and allied aircraft the day after the U.S. military brought down a Syrian warplane.
This highly volatile envi- ronment puts an increas- ing premium on the Special Operations missions.
Despite his nom de guerre, Uzbeki, 39, was a native of Tajikistan, not Uzbekistan,
and honed his fighting skills with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a Taliban-allied jihadi group, according to a U.S. military official. About 10 years ago, he moved to Pakistan, where he had extensive contacts with al-Qaida, the official said. In recent years, he had moved to Syria and joined the Islamic State’s fighting ranks.
Uzbeki was close to Baghdadi and helped plot a deadly attack on a nightclub in Istanbul on New Year’s Day.