Eastern Eye (UK)

Multan bus ‘race’ kills 20

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A SPEEDING bus collided with an oil tanker in Pakistan, killing 20 people in a fiery crash overnight, police and rescue officials said on Tuesday (16).

“Three buses were racing. One of them rammed into an oil tanker,” police official Imran Shaukat said, describing the incident near the city of Multan.

The crash triggered a fire that engulfed both the tanker and the bus. The oil tanker was burnt too badly to identify the company it belonged to, he added.

A spokesman for the motorway police said the tanker’s driver fled the scene.

Officials from a staterun rescue service said the bus was bound for Karachi, and identified the operator as the Daewoo bus company. They said at least 20 passengers had died in the accident, some of them badly burnt.

An employee at Daewoo’s Lahore office confirmed that its bus was involved in the incident, and that the driver was among the dead. Senior officials at the company were not available for comment.

Six passengers survived, an official of the rescue service said.

“The fire was raging when we got here,” he said, adding that most of the passengers were asleep at the time.

 ?? ?? TRAGEDY: Rescue workers at the site of the accident
TRAGEDY: Rescue workers at the site of the accident

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