The Pakistani authorities raised this Sunday to 30 the death toll in the derailment of a dozen carriages of a train in southern Pakistan, which also caused 80 injuries for the moment, while rescue teams work to get more passengers out. could get trapped.
“More bodies have been removed, so the dead have risen to 30 and there are 80 injured for now. The rescue operation is still underway and a wagon is being cut to remove possible injured. There may be more injured or dead inside, but we are not sure,” police officer Ashraf Zardari, who is at the scene of the accident, told EFE.
The accident took place near the Nawabshah district, in the province of Sindh, when the train was heading from the southern city of Karachi to the town of Sargodha, in the eastern province of Punjab, the company’s spokesperson in Sindh told EFE. State Railways, Pakistan Railways, Muhammed Anjum.
Television images immediately after the accident showed a large number of passengers near the derailed carriages, some of them lying on the ground.
Rescue teams are currently in the area of ??the accident, where they are working to raise the cars that derailed after the link between the locomotive and the rest of the train separated, Zardari reported.
However, high temperatures in the region, as well as the need to use cranes to lift the cars and special tools to cut metal to rescue passengers, are delaying operations, he added.
Numerous medical personnel also traveled to the place to treat the injured, who are being transferred to hospitals in nearby towns.
Train accidents are common in Pakistan, which has an ancient railway network dating back to 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 an attack with explosives against a moving train that left at least one woman dead and seven other people 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.
