3-Train Crash in Pakistan Kills 100

More than 100 people were killed and hundreds injured in southeastern Pakistan today when a passenger train crashed into the rear of another train stopped at a station, and a third train then hit the derailed cars, police said.

Pakistan’s deadliest train wreck in more than a decade left the station yard covered with twisted wreckage. Police and railway officials said that body parts were strewn about and that rescuers had been forced to cut through metal to reach some victims.

“It is a very gruesome situation,” Police Chief Agha Mohammed Tahir told Associated Press. “Rescue workers have started to pull the dead and injured out.”

Nineteen carriages were derailed in all, police said. At the site of the disaster, many of the injured were being treated and people were searching for missing loved ones.

Police officers said it was too early to determine the cause of the crash but that a technical fault was suspected.

Abdul Wahab Awan, general manager of Pakistan Railways, said he believed a driver had made a mistake.

“The crash occurred because of misreading of a signal by the driver of Karachi Express and it rammed the Quetta Express, which was not moving,” he said.

Ghotki is about 270 miles northeast of the port city of Karachi, in remote Sindh province.

The Quetta Express was carrying passengers from the eastern city of Lahore to the western city of Quetta when it developed a technical problem and stopped at the station.

Technicians were working on the train when the Karachi Express, a night coach from Lahore traveling to Karachi, plowed into it. The impact pushed cars onto an adjacent track where they were hit by the Tezgam Express, which was heading north from Karachi to Rawalpindi.