Re: Over 500 Dead in Multiple Train Collision
**150 killed, 1,000 injured in Pakistan train crash
**
Three passenger trains collided at a southern Pakistan station early Wednesday, killing more than 150 people and injuring more than 1,000 others, according to Pakistani officials.
Officials expect the death toll to rise to 300 following the horrible accident, as rescue workers are trying to pull out hundreds of passengers still trapped in derailed carriages.
Officials say that this is the deadliest train wreck in Pakistan’s history.
Witnesses said that the station yard was covered with twisted steel from at least 13 derailed cars, and body parts were strewn about as emergency crews had to cut through metal to reach some victims.
“It’s a painful scene. There are bodies scattered all over. People are crying, fathers are looking for children, husbands for their wives and brothers for their sisters,” one witness said.
“It is a very gruesome situation,” police chief Agha Mohammed Tahir told reporters.
“Rescue workers have started to pull the dead and injured out. There were many people inside and there are a lot of casualties.”
Survivors were awoken to the horror after being thrown from their seats.
Suraya, a 22-year-old woman, said “we were sleeping and we woke up to a huge bang”.
“I fell down to the floor. Then I heard the screams.”
Abdul Wahab Awan, general manager of Pakistan Railways, said that more than 100 people were killed and hundreds more were injured in the train crash.
Ruling out sabotage, Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, the national head of the Crisis Management Center at the Interior Ministry, described the crash as “a pure accident.”
“We cannot give a figure for the death toll and a rescue operation is going on,” he said.
Abdul Aziz, a senior controller at Pakistan Railways described how the accident took place, saying that around 4 a.m., a train sitting in a station near the Sindh province city of Ghotki, 370 miles northeast of Karachi, in remote Sindh province, was hit in the rear by a second train, the Karachi Express. Then a third train slammed into cars derailed in the first crash.
“Our train was standing still when it was hit from the rear. Our car jumped and flipped on its side,” said Khuda Bakhsh Larak, 50, who was in the Quetta Express and suffered head injuries.
The driver of the Karachi Express, which was carrying passengers from the eastern city of Lahore to the southwestern city of Quetta, misread a signal, one official said.
“The driver of the Karachi Express thought the signal allowed him to pass and he rammed into the rear part of the Quetta Express,” said Junaid Qureshi, a senior railway official.
It was not known if the Karachi train driver survived the crash.
Railway traffic in the area has been halted by the crash and officials say it could take many hours to restore.
The injured were taken in ambulances and private car to hospitals in the region, and special trains were sent to the scene to take stranded survivors to their destinations.
In 1989, 400 people were killed in a train crash near Sangi, a town 35 miles from Ghotki.