Another day, another slaughter on Pakistan’s roads. This time, thirty-two people are dead and sixteen others are mangled after an overloaded passenger bus screamed off a mountain road and plunged into a deep ravine in the country’s southwest.
The vehicle was making the long haul from Quetta to Peshawar. It never made it. Around 08:00 local time on Friday, the bus careened off the asphalt in the treacherous Dana Sar mountain range, a rugged border zone slicing between Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces.
They were packed in like cattle. A government official at Zhob Hospital confirmed to reporters that 48 passengers, including women and children, were crammed into the vehicle when it went over the edge.
Investigators are pointing fingers at a steering failure. They think the driver lost control, sending the bus skidding off the cliffside, though the official inquiry is just starting. Photos from the gorge show a crushed metal carcass.
Rescuers faced hell. The bus dropped 70 to 80 feet into the rocky abyss, according to Sanaullah Sherani, who heads the Zhob district emergency services. First responders flooded the area, but the brutal terrain turned the recovery effort into a slow, agonizing crawl. The survivors were eventually hauled out and rushed to a hospital in Zhob, some 42 miles away.
It gets worse. The bus was never supposed to be that full. Shahid Rind, a spokesperson for Balochistan’s chief minister, noted that the driver had stopped to scoop up stranded passengers from another bus that had broken down earlier on the route. Greed or charity, it proved fatal.
Politicians did what they always do. President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif released canned statements of grief. Balochistan’s Chief Minister, Sarfraz Bugti, took to social media to offer condolences and demand an immediate investigation.
But don’t hold your breath for change. This is a systemic bloodbath. Pakistan’s roads are notoriously lethal, plagued by abysmal infrastructure, decrepit vehicles, and drivers who treat traffic laws as mere suggestions. Just earlier this year, 17 pilgrims heading to Balochistan for Eid were killed in an identical horror show when their bus took a dive into a ravine. Different day, same tragedy.
