62 die in coach-truck collision outside Karachi

Collision occurred on the 17-kilometre Kathore link road that connects the Super Highway with the National Highway

A fierce blaze sparked by a collision between an oil tanker and a passenger bus on a highway link road left at least 62 people, including women and children, dead in the wee hours of Sunday.

The horrific collision occurred on the 17 kilometre-long Kathore link road that connects the Super Highway with the National Highway – which is about 36 kilometres away from Sohrab Goth and falls under the National Highway Authority’s jurisdiction.





Five young and jobless friends who wanted to join the police force to support their families were burned alive in the passenger bus that collided with an oil tanker on Saturday night. The accident took place at Kathore Link Road at around midnight when the overloaded Shikarpur-bound passenger bus collided head-on with the oil tanker coming from the opposite direction.





The charred bodies of the 62 victims who were burned alive in the aftermath of the collision between the passenger coach and the oil tanker now lie in the Edhi morgue. Although the family members of most of the victims have arrived to claim the bodies, it will take another two to three days for the DNA test results, after which they can bury their loved ones.





On Thursday, Ikhtiyar Ali left his home in Sukkur with five of his friends to appear for the Special Services Unit (SSU) test in Karachi. He never thought that he would be the only one coming back.

“We boarded the bus at the Quaidabad bus stop and I was told to sit on the roof instead of the seats as there was no room inside,” he said while talking to The Express Tribune, adding that they were sitting on the roof of the bus and jumped when the passenger coach collided with an oil tanker.





The fatal accident that claimed more than 60 lives on Karachi’s National Highway included 17 people from different parts of upper Sindh.





Families stood in a line outside Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC) waiting for their turn to go inside and give blood samples which would help identify their loved one from the 60 bodies that lay in the hospital’s morgue on Sunday morning.