At least 28 people died According to the Minister of Railways, a train derailed in southern Pakistan this Sunday and an emergency was declared in the local hospitals They were unable to tend to the dozens of wounded.
Accidents and derailments are common outdated rail system from Pakistan, which almost has 7,500 kilometers of track and transports more than 80 million passengers annually.
“It’s a pretty serious accident,” the railway minister told the press. Khawaja Saad Rafique.
“According to information available so far, 28 passengers have died and many have been injured.”
Rafique hinted at that There were at least 1,000 passengers on board the Hazara Express when it derailed on a section of track where no fault had been reported.
“There could be two reasons: first, that it was a mechanical failure or that the failure was caused – it could be sabotage. We will look into it.”
The derailment happened near Sahara railway station near the town of Nawabshah in southern Sindh province.
“Eight wagons derailed,” he explained. Mohsin Syala railway official, told local network HUM News.
The railway minister said that the Emergency in local hospitals while doctors struggled to treat the injured.
Chaotic scenes ensued at the Nawabshah Trauma Center as ambulances and private cars rushed the injured for treatment.
A man jumped from the back of an ambulance and held a child whose clothes were soaked in blood while a woman cried in pain as she was carried away on a stretcher.
“We don’t know what happened, we were sitting inside,” said a stunned woman.
Dozens of cars, tractors, rickshaws and motorbikes were parked on a road bordering the railway at the scene of the accident on the outskirts of Nawabshah.
Volunteers crossed a canal separating the highway from the railroad to help, lifting the wounded to help.
auxiliary train
Some passenger compartments stood upright but off the tracks, while others lay on their side with the mangled steel of the undercarriage twisted and bent.
Younis Chandioa senior police official told Geo News from the scene of the accident that some passengers were trapped in a train car.
Ijaz Shaha provincial railroad official told AFP that an emergency train had been dispatched to the scene of the accident.
The Hazara Express is a daily passenger train that departs from the southern port city of Karachi and takes around 33 hours to reach Havelian in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, some 1,600 kilometers to the north.
In June 2021, two trains collided near Daharki in Sindh causing at least 65 dead and about 150 wounded.
In this accident, an express train derailed on the opposite track and about a minute later, a second passenger train crashed into the wreck.
At least 75 passengers burned in a fire on the Tezgam express train in October 2019, while a collision between two trains in Ghotki in 2005 killed more than 100 people.