Nearly 50 dead in bus crash near capital

A crowded bus collided with a tractor-trailer on a busy bridge on Wednesday, just 15 kilometers from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and plunged into a dry river-bed, killing nearly 50 people and injuring another ten seriously, according to a humanitarian aid official. "The trailer hit the bus from the back and knocked it off the bridge," Naeem Tarrar, a liaison officer for the Edhi Foundation, a privately-run humanitarian service, told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Although eyewitness accounts put the total number of dead at close to 50, Tarrar said that Edhi Foundation ambulances had ferried 43 bodies to hospitals and that he couldn't be sure about the exact body count. "We collected 43 bodies in our own Edhi ambulance service," he said. "That's the total number of dead bodies that we collected and shifted to hospitals and then to the victims' homes," he added. Although some eyewitnesses had reported seeing another seven or eight bodies at the site of the crash, Tarrar said there was no way to verify just how many more had perished in the deadly accident which occurred just after 6:00 a.m. local time. "There were some people who rushed to the spot from villages in the vicinity and took bodies away to their homes, so the deaths were not registered in hospitals," he explained. "Eyewitness accounts also differed: some said there were another eight bodies, some other people said there were less, and others said there were more. So there's no way to ascertain how many there might be," Tarrar said. The accident occurred just over a week after a truck carrying pilgrims home from a shrine at a popular hill-station close to Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, plunged into a ravine in the hills near the town of Abbottabad in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), killing 38 and injuring eight others.