AHSA, 16 February — A new theory, centering on a possible blow-out, has emerged as the cause of the devastating accident in Ahsa last Wednesday in which 40 pilgrims — 37 of them Pakistanis — died.
The victims will be buried in Al-Ahsa over the next three days.
However, a Pakistani Embassy official in Riyadh said many of the bodies are still to be identified.
Most of the Pakistani victims were from the cities of Multan, Rawalpindi and Islamabad.
Identification of the dead has been delayed because the charred bodies are beyond recognition and almost all their documents have perished in the fire which engulfed the vehicles after the collision.
Officials at the Pakistan Embassy have been praised for attending to the needs of the injured in the hospital.
The administrator at King Fahd Hospital in Ahsa, where the nine injured Pakistani pilgrims are receiving treatment, said that all were in a stable condition and will soon be discharged.
“The majority suffered fractures. At most, some may need surgery,” he explained.
He said, however, that many were grief-stricken at losing their fellow pilgrims and friends, although most had reconciled to the grim turn of events.
The testimony of survivors contradicts earlier accounts of the accident, which said that the bus was trying to overtake another vehicle when it collided head-on with an oncoming trailer truck.
Muhammad Latif, whose leg was broken in the accident, said that in fact a tire burst and, as a result, the Syrian driver lost control. This was the reason, he continued, that the bus collided with the truck.
“I was awake and heard the sound of the tire burst,” said Sultan Amin, another injured passenger. “The bus swerved and hit the truck coming in the opposite direction. The impact was so strong that the seats jammed into one another and people got stuck in them.”
“The bus caught fire after the crash. We broke the windowpanes and jumped out. We then helped pull out others trapped inside,” added Amin.
“Most of us were sleeping when the crash happened, at around 1.45 a.m.,” said 39-year-old Amanat Ali. “It was all so confused. I cannot recollect the exact details. But what I do remember clearly is that rescuers outside broke through the windowpanes and pulled us out. I was among the lucky few. Many of the passengers were burned alive”
Forty-four of the passengers on bus were employed by Khalifa ibn Zayed Air Force College in Al-Ain, UAE. All of them were recruited two years ago, the Gulf News reported yesterday. They were technicians and engineers.
Their colleagues in Al-Ain said they were all saddened by the tragedy. “We have received hundreds of calls from Pakistan from relatives and friends of the victims and have been explaining the situation to them,” one of them said.
An Egyptian, Mohammed Yaseen, and a Sudanese, Abdul Aziz, were among those who died on the bus.
Striving to console those who were bereaved by the tragedy, Islamic scholars said the dead would earn the reward for martyrs.
