Images shared on social media showed charred, twisted metal strewn across the highway
Kabul:
A bus collided with an oil tanker and a motorcycle on Sunday, killing 21 people and injuring 38 others, officials in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province said.
Fatal traffic accidents are common in the country, in part due to poor road conditions, dangerous driving on highways and a lack of regulation.
“On Sunday morning, a tanker truck, a motorcycle and a passenger bus collided, killing 21 people and injuring 38 others,” the provincial information department said in a post on X.
The accident occurred on the Herat-Kandahar highway in Grishk District, Helmand Province.
Mohammad Qasim Riaz, spokesman for the Helmand provincial governor, told AFP the collision caused the vehicle to catch fire.
Images shared by the information department on social media showed charred, twisted metal strewn across highways and the tanker’s crushed cabin.
Cleanup crews were at the scene removing debris, according to officials.
Among the injured, 11 were seriously injured and 27 were slightly injured.
According to Helmand provincial traffic management officials, the bus was traveling from Herat to the capital Kabul when it collided with a motorcycle carrying two people for the first time, killing two passengers.
The bus driver lost control and collided with an oil tanker traveling from the southern city of Kandahar to Herat, causing a fire.
The accident killed 3 people on the tanker truck and 16 bus passengers.
Another serious accident involving an oil tanker occurred in December 2022, when the oil tanker overturned and caught fire in the high-altitude Salang Pass in Afghanistan, killing 31 people and burning dozens more.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
