ISLAMABAD (AFP/DPA) – At least 28 people have been killed after a train travelling from the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi to Abbottabad derailed in the city of Nawabshah in Sindh province, according to the country’s railways minister.
“This is quite a big accident,” railway minister Khawaja Saad Rafique told reporters. “According to the information so far, 28 passengers have been killed and many are injured.”
“It would be premature to talk about the cause of the accident, which could be a mechanical fault or an act of terrorism,” Rafique said.
About 50 people have been injured in the accident, Muqarrab Khan, a local police officer from the Sanghar district of Sindh, told the dpa news agency.
Mohsin Syal, a railway official, earlier told HUM News channel that eight coaches of the Hazara Express, which was travelling from Karachi to Abbottabad, derailed near Sahara railway station in Nawabshah, about 275km (170 miles) from Karachi, the capital of Sindh province.
Ijaz Shah, a provincial railway official, told the AFP news agency that several passengers were killed and many others injured in the accident, without providing an exact casualty figure.
Images posted to local media show dozens of people at the site, with some smashing windows to help passengers clamber out of the twisted carriages and at least one coach overturned.
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 accident 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.
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 1,600 kilometres north (994 miles).
Accidents and derailments occur frequently on Pakistan’s antiquated railway system. In June 2021 two trains collided near Daharki in Sindh, killing at least 65 people and injuring about 150 others.
In that accident, an express derailed onto the opposite track, and a second passenger train crashed into the wreckage roughly a minute later.
At least 75 passengers burnt to death in a fire aboard the Tezgam express train in October 2019, while a two-train collision at Ghotki killed more than 100 people in 2005.