At least 19 killed and more than 50 injured after train derails in Pakistan as rescuers scramble to find survivors
AT least 19 people have been killed and dozens left injured after a train derailed in Pakistan.
The Hazara Express was travelling from Karachi to Rawalpindi when eight carriages came off the tracks near the Sarhari station.
Rescuers are scrambling to find survivors – with some passengers still trapped in carriages.
Officials said at least 19 people have been killed – and the death toll is expected to rise.
Shocking pictures showed dozens of people at the site – with some smashing windows to help passengers clamber out of the twisted carriages.
“This is quite a big accident,” railway minister Khawaja Saad 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.”
There were chaotic scenes at the Nawabshah Trauma Centre as ambulances and cars frantically ferried the injured into the building for treatment.
One man leapt from the back of an ambulance clutching a child with his clothes soaked in blood, while a woman moaned in pain as she was carried in on a stretcher.
At the accident site outside Nawabshah, dozens of cars, tractors, rickshaws and motorcycles could be seen parked up on a road that runs alongside the track.
And people desperately waded through a canal separating the road from the railway line to help.
Rafique said initial investigations showed the train was travelling at normal speed – and they are now probing what led to the derailment.
Crashes and derailments are common on the country’s railway system, which has nearly 4,600 miles of track and carries more than 80 million passengers a year.
In June 2021 two trains collided near Daharki in Sindh, killing at least 65 people and injuring about 150 others.
A train had derailed onto the opposite track, and a second passenger train crashed into the wreckage roughly a minute later.
In October 2019, at least 75 passengers burnt to death in a fire on the Tezgam express train, and a two-train crash at Ghotki killed more than 100 people in 2005.
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