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.
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