KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) – Three passenger trains crashed in a chain-reaction pileup in a southern Pakistan station early today, killing more than 100 people and injuring hundreds of others, officials said.

Pakistan’s deadliest train wreck in more than a decade left the station yard covered with twisted steel from at least 13 derailed cars. Officials said body parts were strewn about and emergency crews had to cut through metal to reach some victims.

“It is a very gruesome situation,” police chief Agha Mohammed Tahir told The Associated Press. “Rescue workers have started to pull the dead and injured out. There were many people inside and there are a lot of casualties.”

Abdul Wahab Awan, general manager of Pakistan Railways, said officials on the scene had told him more than 100 people were dead and hundreds more injured.

The crash started about 4 a.m. when a train sitting in a station near the Sindh province city of Ghotki was hit in the rear by a second train, the Karachi Express. A third, oncoming train then slammed into cars derailed in the first crash, said Abdul Aziz, a senior controller at Pakistan Railways.

Awan said the driver of the Karachi Express misread a signal.

“The crash occurred because of misreading of a signal by the driver of Karachi Express and it rammed the Quetta Express, which was not moving,” Awan told The Associated Press.

The injured were taken in ambulances and private car to area hospitals. Special trains were being sent to take stranded survivors to their destinations, officials said.

Ghotki is about 370 miles northeast of Karachi, in remote Sindh province.

The Quetta Express was carrying passengers from the eastern city of Lahore to the southwestern city of Quetta when it developed a technical problem and stopped at the station.

Technicians were working on the train when the Karachi Express, a night-coach from Lahore traveling to the southern port city of Karachi plowed into it.

The impact pushed cars onto an adjacent track where they were hit by the oncoming Tezgam Express, which was taking passengers from Karachi north to Rawalpindi, near the capital of Islamabad.

Pakistan’s railways are antiquated, and dozens of people have been killed in train accidents in recent years. Ghotki has been a particularly dangerous point in the network and the site of repeated accidents over the years.

A train carrying 800 passengers from Karachi to Lahore slammed into a parked freight train at Ghotki on June 8, 1991, killing more than 100 people. Authorities blamed staff negligence for that accident.

In December 1989, a train crash near Sangi, a town 35 miles from Ghotki, killed 400 people.

Copy the Story Link