Fire engulfs speeding train in Pakistan, killing more than 70

At least 71 people were killed in central Pakistan on Thursday morning after a cooking stove being used on a train exploded, officials said. Witnesses said that some desperate passengers began jumping off the burning train while it was still moving.

The train, known as the Tezgam Express, was on its run from the southern city of Karachi to the city of Rawalpindi when three cars caught fire around 6:30 a.m. near a railway station at Liaquat Pur, a city in the southern province of Punjab.

Officials said some passengers had been preparing breakfast aboard the train, which is against regulations, when the gas cylinder fueling the stove exploded. The resulting fire quickly engulfed three cars full of passengers — two economy-class cars and one business-class car. At least 44 people were reported to have been injured.

Uzma Bibi was on the train with 17 family members on their way to a wedding in the city of Lahore. They heard an explosion, she said, and looked out the windows to see flames starting to billow out from nearby cars.

People and rescue workers gather near the site after a fire broke out in a passenger train and destroyed three carriages near the town of Rahim Yar Khan, Pakistan Oct 31, 2019. REUTERS

“There was panic, and everyone started shouting,” she said. “Seven people in our car jumped off to save their lives.”

Chaudhry Shujaat, who was on the train with his wife and two children, told The Associated Press that they could “hear people crying and screaming for help.”

“I thought we would die,” he said. “The next car was on fire. We felt so helpless.”

Many passengers in the economy cars belonged to Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic evangelical group, and were traveling to attend an annual congregation of the fraternity near Lahore, the provincial capital of Punjab.

Local news media quoted one passenger who identified himself as a member of Tablighi Jamaat saying that a short circuit in a fan was to blame for the fire, not a cooking stove. And he said that the emergency brake in passenger cars did not seem to work, which may have lengthened the amount of time the train kept moving while the fire burned. His account could not be independently verified.

Officials said that 11 people who had been severely burned were flown to a hospital in a nearby city, Multan, on a military helicopter.

Prime Minister Imran Khan said he was “deeply saddened by the terrible tragedy.” He said in a Twitter post that he had “ordered an immediate inquiry to be completed on an urgent basis.”

A fire burns a train carriage after a gas canister passengers were using to cook breakfast exploded, near the town of Rahim Yar Khan in the south of Punjab province, Pakistan Oct 31, 2019. REUTERS

Shireen Mazari, Pakistan’s minister for human rights, said on Twitter that it was “a tragedy that could have been avoided,” and that for as long as she could recall “no baggage check or restrictions” had been enforced for train travel.

Accidents have become frequent on Pakistan Railways, and accusations of poor maintenance, corruption and lax safety standards have intensified.

At least 80 accidents were reported between July 2018 and July 2019. In the worst, at least 21 people were killed and 85 were wounded on July 11 when a passenger train collided with a freight train near Sadiqabad.  On June 20, a passenger train collided with a freight train in Hyderabad, resulting in the death of the driver and an assistant driver.

As Mr. Khan ran for prime minister last year, his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, vowed to turn Pakistan Railways around, saying that corruption and mismanagement in previous administrations were to blame for the service’s dismal state.

But since Mr. Khan came to power last year, it has struggled just as much to improve safety and efficiency, analysts say. The current railway minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, who has held the post before, is a veteran politician and ally of Khan.

On Thursday, Mr. Rashid insisted that the rail system was not to blame for the deaths.

“It is not the fault of Pakistan Railways,” he said. “The passengers are responsible for this.”

He added that an inquiry would be carried out to see why passengers had been able to bring gas cylinders onto the train.

© 2019 New York Times News Service