It was unclear what triggered the crash. Pakistan’s railway minister, Khawaja Saad Rafique, mentioned the train had been operating at a comparatively gradual pace of 28 miles per hour when it crashed close to Nawabshah metropolis in Sindh, Pakistan’s second-most-populous province.
“It could be a technical fault, or it could be an act of sabotage,” mentioned Rafique, including that an investigation is underway.
Officials mentioned a number of kids had been among the many injured, and photographs from the scene confirmed overturned and mangled passenger vehicles.
Pakistan’s ageing railway community has lengthy lacked funding, and there was mounting criticism of inadequate security checks — elements that contributed to quite a few main railway accidents in the previous.
Two years in the past, 65 individuals had been killed when two trains collided in the identical province the place Sunday’s incident befell. A gasoline explosion and hearth on a train in Punjab province killed over 70 individuals in 2019.
Noack reported from Paris. Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.
