Pakistan PM visits victims as tanker blaze death toll rises to 157
Fifty severely burned victims are being treated in hospital after the disaster outside the town of Bahawalpur.
Pakistan’s prime minister cut short a trip abroad to rush to the side of victims of a massive fuel tanker fire as authorities raised the death toll from the blaze to 157.
The truck, carrying some 6,600 gallons (25,000 litres) of gasoline, was travelling from the southern port city of Karachi to Lahore, the Punjab provincial capital, when the driver lost control and crashed on a highway outside the town of Bahawalpur early on Sunday.
Alerted by an announcement over a mosque loudspeaker that an overturned tanker was leaking fuel, scores of villagers rushed to the scene to collect the spilled fuel when the blaze ignited. The wreck then exploded, engulfing people in flames as they screamed in terror.
Dr Nahid Ahmed at the Nishter Hospital in the city of Multan, about 60 miles away from the site of the fire, said four of the victims had died overnight, taking the death toll to 157. He said 50 severely burned victims were being treated at his hospital.
Rescue official Mohammad Baqar said 20 victims had been transported by a military C-130 plane from Bahawalpur to Lahore on Monday for better medical care.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who visited the Victoria Hospital in Bahawalpur on Monday, ordered that more of the most critically injured be transferred to bigger hospitals in the area, Mr Baqar said.
Mr Sharif cut short his trip abroad and rushed back home, reaching Bahawalpur on Monday to visit the victims and console the affected families.
He also announced 2 million rupees – about £24,330 – as financial assistance for each family that lost a relative in the highway inferno, and handed over cheques for 1 million rupees (£12,165) for each burned victim being treated at the hospital in Bahawalpur.
“This is not compensation – no compensation is possible for precious human life – but it is to help the affected families in distress,” Mr Sharif said, expressing his prayers for those killed and for a speedy recovery of the burned victims.
Many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition and will have to be identified through DNA testing, said Mr Baqar. “I have never seen anything like it in my life. Victims trapped in the fireball. They were screaming for help,” said Abdul Malik, a police officer who was among the first to arrive on the scene of horror.
When the flames subsided, he said: “We saw bodies everywhere. So many were just skeletons. The people who were alive were in really bad shape.”
The disaster struck on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr which follows the holy month of Ramadan. While Saudi Arabia and most other Muslim countries started celebrating the holiday on Sunday, Pakistanis were marking it on Monday.
