At least 15 people died and more than 50 were injured this Sunday when several carriages of a train derailed in the province of Sindh, in southern Pakistan. “We have removed 15 corpses and more than 50 wounded. We are having a hard time rescuing the people trapped inside the derailed wagons because it is very hot and the necessary machinery has not yet arrived,” police officer Ashraf Zardari told Efe from the scene of the accident. “There are two wagons that hang and can only be disassembled with the help of a crane. The train’s locomotive broke apart when the link that attached it to the rest of the train broke. The carriages were left free to move, so ten of them derailed,” he added.
The Minister of Railways, Khawaja Saad Rafique, affirmed that it is “a really serious accident”, reported Agence France Presse. “Additional rescue teams have been dispatched to the scene,” he added. Images published by local media showed dozens of people at the scene, some breaking train windows to help passengers get out of the twisted carriages.
The rail accident took place in Nawabshah district of Sindh province as the train was en route from the southern city of Karachi to Abbottabad in the eastern Punjab province, the Sindh spokesman for the state railway company said, Pakistan Railways, Muhammed Anjum. The spokesman indicated that two trains are heading to the scene of the incident with medical personnel to provide relief to the injured, and operators to help in the rescue efforts, as well as to clear the track, which has been completely blocked.
Train accidents are frequent in Pakistan, which has an old railway network dating from the days of the British Empire, from which it gained independence in 1947. Added to its antiquated infrastructure is the threat of attacks by insurgent groups, such as the one that took place last February, when a separatist group operating in the east of the country carried out a bombing attack on a moving train that left at least one woman dead and seven others injured. In 2021, a collision between two trains in the south of Pakistan resulted in 62 deaths, in addition to thirty injuries. In October 2019, a total of 73 people died from the explosion of a gas cylinder that passengers used to prepare breakfast on a train in the south of the country.
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