KABUL: Two bus accidents involving a fuel tanker and a truck on a highway through central Afghanistan killed at least 52 people and injured 68, a provincial official said Thursday. The accidents happened in Ghazni province on the same highway between the capital Kabul and southern Kandahar city late Wednesday, provincial head of information and culture Hamidullah Nisar said on X, without specifying how many people were killed and injured in each accident. “There is a possibility the numbers could rise,” Nisar told reporters outside a hospital in Ghazni city where victims had been sent.

He noted that some of the injured were in a “critical condition” and had been sent to Kabul for treatment. “Among the injured and dead were children, women and elderly people,” he added. One bus collided with a fuel tanker near Shahbaz village in central Ghazni while the other hit a truck in the eastern district of Andar, Nisar said. Chief government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid posted on X that the authorities had “great regret” over the accidents and that an investigation would be launched.

Teams worked to clear debris at the sites into the morning, with hunks of metal and broken glass strewn across the area in Andar along with the clothes and meals of bus passengers, an AFP journalist saw. One of the injured in the accident in Shahbaz, Khadim, said he was jolted awake by the noise of the accident but then lost consciousness. When he came to and pulled himself from the wreck he “saw there were a lot of people under the vehicle and on the ground around us, there was crying and blood everywhere”.

The two destroyed buses were transported to a lot in Ghazni city, their crushed and twisted frames and seats splattered with blood. The vehicles “were badly damaged” and the bus had been “bashed around” said Rahim, who was at the site in Shahbaz not long after the accident. “We were gathering the stuff from the site, there were human legs, I buried them there, it was a very intense accident,” he told AFP.

Traffic accidents are common in Afghanistan, due in part to poor roads after decades of conflict, dangerous driving on highways and a lack of regulation. In March, more than 20 people were killed and 38 injured when a bus collided with a fuel tanker and burst into flames in southern Helmand province. 

Another serious accident involving a fuel tanker took place in December 2022, when the vehicle overturned and caught fire in Afghanistan’s high-altitude Salang Pass, killing 31 people. — AFP