Pakistani Bus Crash Kills Dozens

At least 42 people were killed in a Pakistani bus crash Sunday morning, and 30 others are currently being treated for injuries.

The crash happened in the Sukkur district of the southern Sindh Province after the bus collided head-on with a flatbed trailer truck on a busy highway. The driver of the bus lost control and slammed right into the oncoming trailer truck, and unfortunately, the driver was killed instantly. Although the bus should only have been able to hold 60 people, the New York Times reports that it was overloaded at 75 passengers.

Of the 42 people that were killed in the Pakistani bus crash, 14 of them were women and 13 were children. Survivors of the crash have already started to blame the deceased driver for the accident, saying that he was driving recklessly and had been trying to pass another vehicle on a narrow road before hitting the trailer head-on. The driver of the trailer truck was injured in the crash, and Sukkur police say they are investigating to see if either driver did anything criminal. First responders apparently rushed to the scene to help cut the victims out from the mangled metal bus, but when they arrived, they were too late to help the majority of the passengers.

According to Al Jazeera, 10 members of the same family were all traveling together on the bus when the accident happened, and sadly, six were killed while two others were injured. Two other family members, 18-year-old Maryam Bibi and six-year-old Samad Bibi, were unharmed in the accident.

“We were ten members of one family, six of them died and two were injured,” said Bibi to Al Jazeera as she recounted the horrific accident.

Statistics show that Pakistan has one of the highest records for fatal traffic accidents in the world. The New York Times reports that, according to National Highway and Motor Police superintendent Tahir Kahn, nearly 15,000 people a year have died in traffic-related accidents. Kahir blames the high number of fatalities on the quality of roads in the country as well as a lot of reckless driving.

Pakistan seems to be no stranger to fatal bus-related incidents. Just last year, a bus bomb killed nine and injured seven in northwestern Peshawar. The country has seen its fair share of violence over the years, particularly since the start of wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but the extremely high number of traffic-related fatalities every year, besides this weekend’s bus crash, seem to go virtually unreported amidst incidents like last year’s bus bombing.