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.
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
ESPIONAGE: The British government’s decision on the proposed embassy hinges on the security of underground data cables, a former diplomat has said A US intervention over China’s proposed new embassy in London has thrown a potential resolution “up in the air,” campaigners have said, amid concerns over the site’s proximity to a sensitive hub of critical communication cables. The furor over a new “super-embassy” on the edge of London’s financial district was reignited last week when the White House said it was “deeply concerned” over potential Chinese access to “the sensitive communications of one of our closest allies.” The Dutch parliament has also raised concerns about Beijing’s ideal location of Royal Mint Court, on the edge of the City of London, which has so
With a monthly pension barely sufficient to buy 15 eggs or a small bag of rice, Cuba’s elderly people struggle to make ends meet in one of Latin America’s poorest and fastest-aging countries. As the communist island battles its deepest economic crisis in three decades, the state is finding it increasingly hard to care for about 2.4 million inhabitants — more than one-quarter of the population — aged 60 and older. Sixty is the age at which women — for men it is 65 — qualify for the state pension, which starts at 1,528 pesos per month. That is less than US$13