At least 28 killed after train derails in southern Pakistan
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The derailment of the Hazara Express happened near Sahara railway station in the city of Nawabshah.
PHOTO: AFP
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KARACHI – At least 28 people were killed when an express train derailed in southern Pakistan on Sunday, according to local media.
“According to the information so far, 28 passengers have been killed and many are injured,” Minister for Railways Khawaja Saad Rafique told reporters.
He added that at least 1,000 people were aboard the Hazara Express when it came off the tracks.
“This is quite a big accident,” Mr Rafique told reporters.
“There can be two reasons: first, that it was a mechanical fault; or the fault was created – it might be a sabotage. We will investigate it.”
The derailment occurred near Sahara railway station close to Nawabshah city in the southern Sindh province.
“Eight coaches have derailed,” railway official Mohsin Syal told local media outlet HUM News.
There were chaotic scenes at the Nawabshah Trauma Centre as ambulances and private cars ferried the injured for treatment.
One man leapt from the back of an ambulance clutching a child, his clothes soaked in blood, while a woman moaned in pain as she was carried in on a stretcher.
“We don’t know what happened. We were just sitting inside,” said one dazed woman.
At the incident site outside Nawabshah, dozens of cars, tractors, rickshaws and motorcycles could be seen parked on a road that runs alongside the track.
Volunteers were wading through a canal that separates the road from the railway line to help, and lifting the injured to get them assistance.
Some passenger compartments were upright but off the tracks, while others lay on their side, the mangled steel from the undercarriage twisted and buckled.
Relief train
Senior police official Younis Chandio told Geo News from the site that some passengers remained trapped in one carriage.
Mr Ijaz Shah, a provincial railway official, told AFP a relief train had been dispatched to the site.
The Hazara Express is a daily passenger train that leaves the port city of Karachi in the south and takes around 33 hours to reach Havelian in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, some 1,600km north.
Accidents and derailments occur frequently on Pakistan’s antiquated railway system, which has nearly 7,500km of track and carries more than 80 million passengers a year.
Local residents and ambulances at the scene of the derailment of a passenger train in Nawabshah, Pakistan, on Aug 6.
PHOTO: AFP
In June 2021, two trains collided near Daharki in Sindh,
In that incident, an express train derailed onto the opposite track, and a second passenger train crashed into the wreckage roughly a minute later.
At least 75 passengers burned to death in a fire aboard the Tezgam express train
