By Staff Reporter
QUETTA: At least 40 people were killed and eight injured on Friday when an overcrowded passenger bus plunged into a ravine on a mountain road straddling the border of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces, officials said, in one of the country’s deadliest road accidents in years.
The bus, travelling from Quetta to Peshawar, went off the road in the Dhanasar area of Balochistan’s Sherani district just as it crossed into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Dera Ismail Khan district, according to Shahid Rind, adviser to the Balochistan chief minister on media and political affairs.
Rescue officials said the bus was carrying 48 passengers, well beyond what it was designed to hold. Rind said the vehicle had left Quetta on Thursday evening and picked up additional passengers along the way from another bus that had broken down, leaving it overloaded by the time it reached the accident site on Friday morning.
Hazar Wali Kakar, deputy commissioner of Sherani district, said the bus had originally left Quetta with 36 passengers before the driver took on more from the disabled vehicle. He said initial inquiries suggested the driver had lost control of the bus while speeding, though authorities said the precise cause remained under investigation.
Accounts of how far the bus fell were not consistent. Sanaullah Sherani, head of the district emergency centre in Zhob, told Agence France-Presse the bus fell 70 to 80 feet into the ravine. Rescue officials could not immediately reconcile that estimate with other reports of a considerably deeper fall.
Rescue teams from Zhob and Rescue 1122 reached the site soon after the accident and worked through the morning to recover victims from the rugged terrain, according to a statement from Rescue 1122. The eight injured were taken to the District Headquarters Hospital in Zhob, while the bodies were first moved to a nearby rural health centre before being transferred to the same hospital, the statement said.
Sultan Ahmed, medical superintendent at the Zhob hospital, said four of the critically injured were referred to Quetta for more advanced treatment. Doctors were working to identify the dead, he said.
Rind said the Provincial Disaster Management Authority, the health department, the Frontier Corps and other agencies had been mobilised, and he thanked the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government for assisting in the response.
Balochistan Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti ordered an investigation into the accident and assigned the inquiry to the provincial transport secretary, Rind said. He said a comprehensive report had been sought on the causes of the crash and that no negligence would be tolerated in the investigation. The government also pledged to introduce what it called effective safety measures and unspecified reforms to prevent similar accidents.
SAFETY RECORD
Road accidents are common in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest but least populated province, where reckless driving, poor road conditions and mountainous terrain contribute to hundreds of deaths each year. Enforcement of traffic and vehicle safety rules is often limited outside major cities.
Friday’s crash was the latest in a series of fatal road accidents in Pakistan’s mountainous northwest and southwest in recent months. In May, a minibus rammed into a bus parked along a motorway in the northwest, killing 17 people. In April, three women were killed when a vehicle plunged into a ravine in Lower Dir district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In March, three people, including a child, died when a jeep skidded off a wet road and fell into a ravine in Upper Chitral.
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