A father and his two daughters lost their lives on Wednesday, while four others were injured after a car and a passenger coach collided near the Gambat city of Sindh’s Khairpur district, police said.
Fatal road accidents on highways occur frequently in Pakistan, with the main reasons including speeding, hazardous overtaking and disregard for traffic rules.
Gambat Station House Officer (SHO) Rafiq Soomro confirmed the casualties to the media. He said the bodies and the injured have been shifted to the Gambat Institute of Medical Sciences (Gims).
The three individuals were heading towards Karachi in a Toyota Corolla while the coach was bound for upcountry, SHO Soomro said.
He suspected that the car driver either lost control of the steering wheel or fell asleep while driving and hit the coach on the opposite road. It was unclear who was driving the car.
According to the SHO, the deceased were identified as Niaz Mohammad, a resident of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Waziristan region, and his two daughters.
The name of one daughter was ascertained as Asra while the other’s could not be immediately known, the police officer added. He further said the names of the wounded were not known yet.
The accident comes just two days after four friends died in a road accident when their car fell into an irrigation channel called the Naseer canal in Sindh’s Tando Allahyar district.
Last week, two persons on a motorcycle were killed when they were hit by a speeding truck along the Indus Highway near Dadu district’s Khairpur Nathan Shah town.
Khairpur also saw a major accident in February, when 11 passengers died and 35 others were injured when a bus going from Punjab’s Burewala to Sehwan collided with a rickshaw.
In another accident involving devotees the same day, five people were killed and 10 were injured when the van they were travelling in collided with a trailer in Sindh’s Shaheed Benazirabad District.
Days before that, three young Naat Khawans hailing from Gilgit-Baltistan lost their lives in a road accident near Jamshoro district’s Manjhand town while on their way to Karachi.
In late January, at least one person died and 11 others were injured as a Karachi-bound bus collided with a stationary trailer near Nooriabad on the M-9 Karachi-Hyderabad motorway. Over a week before that, two youths and a child were killed when two motorcycles were hit by speeding vehicles on Indus Highway in Jamshoro.
On January 9, a fatal collision between two cars near Dhabeji on the Karachi-Thatta section of the National Highway claimed four lives – including of a newly-wed man and his mother – and left six injured.