NOSRAT ABAD, Iran, 26 June 2004 — Nearly 200 people were feared dead in southeastern Iran when a fuel truck lost control and crashed into a bus at a police post, with the explosion engulfing other trucks, cars and buses, the Iranian Red Crescent said.
At least 90 were confirmed dead but officials said the toll could rise as high as 200 killed, as rescue workers scoured charred buses, cars and lorries in the gruesome task of collecting frazzled body parts.
“Ninety bodies have been recovered, but the death toll could rise further,” a Red Crescent official in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province, told Iranian media.
He said 114 injured had been evacuated from the scene of the accident, which occurred at a police post near here, some 110 kilometers (60 miles) west of Zahedan late on Thursday night. The flames engulfed six buses and five other trucks carrying tar or petrol, causing a massive inferno.
Another Red Crescent official, Alireza Ghadiani, put the death toll at 71. But he added that many bodies had literally melted into the ground due to the intense heat.
Provincial Governor Heydar Ali Nuraye said the horror of the accident meant it would take time to establish a definitive death toll.
The official IRNA news agency said most of the dead were women and children who had stayed in the passenger buses while the men were being searched by police.
State television showed footage of carbonized bodies lying amid a scene of total destruction. It said the tanker caught fire immediately after crashing, sending flames shooting out over a 50-meter radius.
It said the cause of the initial collision 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 driver “was not respecting the speed limit,” provincial police commander Ahmad Najafi told the student news agency ISNA.
The truck reportedly hit an electricity pylon and then the police post, where the other vehicles were waiting.
An AFP correspondent who arrived at the scene late yesterday said the vehicles had been moved off to the side of the road and that the area had been taken charged of by the military.
Roads around Zahedan are dotted with police checkpoints, mostly there to check for drugs. But there were questions raised as to why police had set up a roadblock between two tight bends and in a dip.
Sistan-Baluchestan lies on the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan, and serves as a major transit point for narcotics being smuggled into Iran and to Europe.
Smugglers who sell subsidized Iranian fuel to Pakistan and Afghanistan are also active there, and state TV said some of the trucks parked at the post had been stopped on suspicion of smuggling their highly explosive cargo.
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 year from March 2003 to March 2004, 25,772 were killed.
Thursday’s crash was the third major disaster to strike Iran in six months.
On Dec. 26, at least 26,000 people died when an earthquake flattened the southeastern city of Bam, near where the road accident occurred. On Feb. 18, a train loaded with an explosive cocktail of fuel and fertilizer rolled out of control, derailed and exploded near the northeastern city of Neishabour, killing 289 people.
