KARACHI, Pakistan—A bus collided with a tanker truck carrying oil on a road in southern Pakistan early Sunday, starting a fire that claimed the lives at least 59 passengers, police and hospital officials said.
Police officials said the bus driver and a conductor escaped after jumping out of the vehicle as it was about to crash. The bus driver then fled the scene, said police, who are trying to locate him.
The accident took place just outside Karachi, the country’s financial capital and largest city, in Sindh province. Officials said the bus was traveling to Shikarpur, a district in Sindh province about 300 miles north of Karachi.
“The accident took place on a single-track road connecting to the main highway,” said Rao Anwar, a senior police official. “It appears to have happened due to a combination of rash driving and poor road conditions.”
Mr. Anwar said the fire was set off by a gas cylinder in the bus, not by fuel from the truck.
Rescue workers at the scene said the intense heat melted some of the metal frame of the bus. They were forced to cut the vehicle open to retrieve some of the bodies.
Officials at Karachi’s Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center said they had received the bodies of 59 people, including eight women and two children. The victims suffered severe burns, they said.
Police said there were 70 passengers on the bus, plus the driver and conductor. Eight passengers escaped unharmed, while three were slightly injured.
The crash was the second such major accident in Sindh in recent months. In November last year, 56 people were killed in a similar collision.
Officials say poor infrastructure and the illicit distribution of licenses to unqualified drivers are the main contributors to Pakistan’s traffic fatality rate. Over the past decade, an average of 5,000 Pakistanis have been killed in road accidents every year, according to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics.
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