ISLAMABAD, 21 August 2007 — Twenty five people were killed and eight others were injured when a bus veered off a mountain road in northern Pakistan and crashed into a river gorge yesterday, a military official said.
The accident happened in the Neelum Valley in Kashmir region, which was badly hit by an earthquake in October 2005 that killed about 75,000 people.
“It was apparently due to over-speeding. That’s the reason witnesses are giving,” said a military official in the area, who declined to be identified.
Large parts of the road up the Neelum Valley were swept away in landslides triggered by the 2005 earthquake and the army spent weeks carving and blasting new stretches of road out of mountain sides.
About 40 people were believed to have been on the bus when the accident happened, about 45 km northeast of the town of Muzaffarabad, the official said.
