GHOTKI: As many as 40 people were killed and 105 others were injured in a collision between two passenger trains at Raiti Railway Station area near Daherki on Monday.
According to official, the accident took place around 03:30am when a Millat Express train going to Sargodha from Karachi overturned and collided with a Sir Syed Express train coming from Rawalpindi. As a result, 40 passengers were killed and 105 injured, some of them seriously. The officials said that 14 boogies of both the trains were damaged, some of them badly destroyed.
The police and rescue teams rushed to scene and conducted relief operation. The bodies and injured were shifted to nearby hospitals. The up and down train service was suspended soon after the accident. Army and Rangers troops joined the relief and rescue operation.
A military doctor and paramedics, along with ambulances, moved from Pannu Aqil has also reached the incident site, the ISPR statement said. The statement reads that engineer resources have been moved to carry out essential assistance and rescue work. The army’s special engineer team Urban Search and Rescue is being carried from Rawalpindi to the crash site to speed up relief and rescue efforts.
A relief train was sent from Rohri to the site of the incident. Helpline centres have been set up for passengers in Karachi, Sukkur, Faisalabad and Rawalpindi. Minister for Health and Population Welfare, Sindh, Dr Azra Pechuho offered her deep heartfelt sympathies to all those affected by the trains crash in Daherki this morning and said that emergency had been declared at several hospitals.
In a statement, she said that the Sindh health department had deployed all its facilities to help alleviate the situation and ambulances were being moved immediately to the site of the accident and emergency had been declared at all hospitals at the tertiary and secondary levels in Ghotki, Khairpur, Sukkur and Larkana and were ready to attend to the casualties. So far there are 32 confirmed deaths and 98 injured, however, there was still a chance that these numbers could increase.