41 KILLED IN PAKISTAN BUS CRASH
Forty-one people were killed after a passenger bus fell into a ravine and burst into flames in the southern Baluchistan province Sunday morning, a police official said.
The vehicle was transporting 44 people when it fell off a bridge and caught fire near the town of Bela in the Lasbela district. “Forty-one burned to death,” Qamar Aziz, a police official in Lasbela told The Washington Post via phone.
Three people onboard the bus survived the crash with injuries and were admitted to hospitals, Aziz added. There was no information immediately available on the identities of the survivors or how they were able to survive the crash and subsequent fire.
Bodies, including those of women and children, were charred beyond recognition after their recovery from the crash site, said Hamza Anjum Nadeem, assistant commissioner in Bela, according to the Associated Press. Their remains will be transported to Karachi for DNA sampling and identification, after which he said they would be returned to their families.
The bus crashed on its way from Quetta in the Baluchistan province to Karachi in the neighboring Sindh province, Aziz said.
“The accident happened due to over-speeding and the bus crashed into the pillar of a bridge,” said Nadeem, according to The Associated Press. “It caught fire soon after falling into the ravine.”
Photos show what appeared to be the vehicle’s charred chassis lying on the bed of a gorge as ambulance workers transported the bodies of the victims.
An official at the Lasbela Welfare Trust, one of the charities that deployed ambulances to the scene, said in a message posted to Facebook that rescue workers pulled bodies from the vehicle. Firetrucks and ambulances could be seen surrounding its burned remains in an accompanying video posted by the charity.
“My heartfelt condolences go out to the bereaved families,” Pakistan’s interior minister, Rana Sanaullah Khan, tweeted Sunday. “May Allah provide them with the courage to endure this loss and bless the souls of the deceased.”
In November, a van crashed during floods in Pakistan’s south, killing 20 people in Sindh province on Indus Highway, the AP reported at the time.
The World Health Organization, which collects statistics on road deaths, estimated that 14.3 people in 100,000 died in road traffic fatalities in Pakistan in 2016, the most recent year of available data. For comparison, the United States recorded 11.8 deaths per 100,000 people in 2020, according to the Department of Transportation.