LARKANA-At least six persons — a woman and five children — drowned after a speeding bus carrying 26-30 people slid into stagnant floodwaters near Sujawal town, some 40 kilometres from here, on late Friday. More than 20 people were stated to have been under treatment due to injuries and water intake.
The bus was transporting a wedding party from Wali Chandio village to Sukkur, officials at the Sanjar Bhatti police station said. The deceased woman was identified as Gohar Begum and the children as nine-month-old Ahmed Raza, Kashif Gurgej,10, Younis Chandio, 5, Faheem Chandio, 4, and Suleman Jatoi, 4.
Rescue work by residents of nearby villages was continuing till the last reports came in late in the evening.
Three of the injured persons, four-month-old Abdul Samad Chandio, one-year-old Sitara Zangijo and 18-year-old Asifa Chandio, were admitted to the Chandka Medical College Hospital and the others to the Mirokhan Taluka Hospital, sources said. Another source said that the accident took place at a site where plugging of a relief cut, applied to facilitate diversion of floodwaters, had remained unfinished.
A police post existing paces away from the site was informed about the accident but no official help could turn up promptly while men, women and children trapped in the bus were screaming and shouting in distress. A video clip uploaded on a YouTube channel showed helpless victims crying for help.
After much delay, a crane arrived to lift the bus out of water but it ran out of fuel before accomplishing the task. The exact number of casualties could only be known after completion of the rescue work, the sources said.
As many as 20 people, including 11 children, were killed and more than a dozen others injured in a similar accident in Sehwan on Nov 18 when a minibus carrying families and their relatives from Khairpur to the shrine of Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar plunged into floodwaters near Sehwan.
The driver could not notice, due to darkness, the signboard warning drivers of the danger ahead. Relatives of the victims had alleged that proper arrangements at the site of a wide cut, applied to give way to floodwaters, were not made to prevent such accident. The cut had caused an eight feet deep artificial waterway.