ISLAMABAD, 7 January 2006 — A bus carrying 39 passengers was struck by a landslide apparently loosened by this week’s rains in northwestern Pakistan, killing seven people and injuring 19 others, officials said yesterday.
The accident happened late Thursday on a mountainous road in Kohistan, a town about 350 kilometers northeast of Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, said Zarin Khan, an area police official.
He said the Pakistan Army transported the dead and injured to various hospitals by helicopter.
Khan said out of the 32 rescued passengers, 19 were injured and others were fine.
The Northern Areas Transport Company bus was carrying passengers from Gilgit to Rawalpindi when it met the accident.
Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, spokesman for the army, said their engineers were also working to clear the road that had been blocked by the landslide Thursday night.
Meanwhile, a fire caused by a candle inside a tent killed three children and injured three others in quake-hit Kashmir, an official said yesterday. The incident happened late Thursday in a village on the outskirts of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, said Liaquat Hussain, the deputy commissioner in the region.
The dead included three brothers between ages 2 and 6, he said. The injured, including two children and a 65-year-old man, were taken to a state-run hospital, where they appeared to be in stable condition.
Hussain said the family had pitched the tent next to their home, which was destroyed by the Oct. 8 quake that struck the region and northwestern Pakistan, killing 73,000 people and making over three million homeless. Since then, many survivors have been living in donated camps.
Wahida Shaheen, the children’s mother, told The Associated Press at a hospital that she was sleeping in the tent when the fire broke out. “When I woke up, I saw flames everywhere.”
Shaheen said she ran out for help, but by the time villagers came to help them, fire had already killed her three children.
Several survivors have died or injured in Kashmir and northwestern Pakistan in recent weeks because of fire inside tents, although aid groups have been guiding people how to use stoves and candles in the tents to avoid any damage.
