At least 90 people died in southeastern Iran when a fuel truck lost control and crashed into a police post, with the explosion engulfing other trucks, cars and buses, the Iranian Red Crescent said yesterday.
"Ninety bodies have been recovered, but the death toll could rise further," a Red Crescent official in Zahedan, the provincial capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province, told the student news agency ISNA.
PHOTO: REUTERS
He said 114 injured had also been evacuated from the scene of the accident, which occurred at a police post near Nosrat Abad, some 110km west of Zahedan late Thursday night.
The flames engulfed six buses and five other trucks, two of which were carrying tar, causing a massive inferno, state television reported. It also quoted the Red Crescent as saying that up to 200 people may have been killed.
Zahedan's governor, Heydar Ali Nuraye, said it was impossible to immediately give an accurate toll as a number of bodies and blackened human remains had yet to be recovered.
According to the television, the tanker caught fire immediately after crashing, sending the flames spreading over a perimeter of around 50 meters. State television showed footage of carbonized bodies lying amidst a blackened scene.
It said the cause of the fuel tanker crash had yet to be determined, although one possibility was that the driver lost control of his truck on a steep road approaching the police post.
The truck reportedly hit an electricity pylon and then the police post, where the other vehicles were waiting in line.
The roads around Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province, are dotted with police checkpoints, mostly there to check for drugs.
The state news agency IRNA said most of the dead were women who had stayed in the passenger buses while their husbands were being searched by police.
Sistan-Baluchestan is situated on the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan, and serves as a major transit point for narcotics being smuggled into Iran and to Europe.
Fuel smugglers who sell subsidized Iranian fuel to Pakistan and Afghanistan are also active there.
Iran's roads are already considered to be among the most dangerous in the world. More than a quarter of all cars are over 20 years old, and drivers in general seem to display suicidal tendencies when behind the wheel.
Close to 100,000 people have died in road accidents over the past five years, and during the last Iranian year from March 2003 to March 2004, 25,772 were killed.
‘HYANGDO’: A South Korean lawmaker said there was no credible evidence to support rumors that Kim Jong-un has a son with a disability or who is studying abroad South Korea’s spy agency yesterday said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s daughter, Kim Ju-ae, who last week accompanied him on a high-profile visit to Beijing, is understood to be his recognized successor. The teenager drew global attention when she made her first official overseas trip with her father, as he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Analysts have long seen her as Kim’s likely successor, although some have suggested she has an older brother who is being secretly groomed as the next leader. The South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) “assesses that she [Kim Ju-ae]
In the week before his fatal shooting, right-wing US political activist Charlie Kirk cheered the boom of conservative young men in South Korea and warned about a “globalist menace” in Tokyo on his first speaking tour of Asia. Kirk, 31, who helped amplify US President Donald Trump’s agenda to young voters with often inflammatory rhetoric focused on issues such as gender and immigration, was shot in the neck on Wednesday at a speaking event at a Utah university. In Seoul on Friday last week, he spoke about how he “brought Trump to victory,” while addressing Build Up Korea 2025, a conservative conference
DEADLOCK: Putin has vowed to continue fighting unless Ukraine cedes more land, while talks have been paused with no immediate results expected, the Kremlin said Russia on Friday said that peace talks with Kyiv were on “pause” as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin still wanted to capture the whole of Ukraine. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said that he was running out of patience with Putin, and the NATO alliance said it would bolster its eastern front after Russian drones were shot down in Polish airspace this week. The latest blow to faltering diplomacy came as Russia’s army staged major military drills with its key ally Belarus. Despite Trump forcing the warring sides to hold direct talks and hosting Putin in Alaska, there
North Korea has executed people for watching or distributing foreign television shows, including popular South Korean dramas, as part of an intensifying crackdown on personal freedoms, a UN human rights report said on Friday. Surveillance has grown more pervasive since 2014 with the help of new technologies, while punishments have become harsher — including the introduction of the death penalty for offences such as sharing foreign TV dramas, the report said. The curbs make North Korea the most restrictive country in the world, said the 14-page UN report, which was based on interviews with more than 300 witnesses and victims who had
RSS