A crowded passenger train slammed into a parked freight train at a railway station in Sindh Province Thursday, killing more than 200 people and injuring as many as 700 others, officials said.
An unknown number of people were trapped inside the wreckage, a witness and police said.Officials said negligence by railway personnel was the cause of the disaster, which occurred about 12:30 a.m. in the railway station of Sangi, about 350 miles north of the southern port city of Karachi, the Sindh provincial capital.
The eight-car passenger train, the Zakaria Bahauddin Express, was carrying an unknown number of people and traveling from the Punjab Province city of Multan to Karachi when it plowed into the freight train parked in the station.
The driver of the express jumped from the moving train seconds before impact and was being sought by police, the officials said.
The assistant Sangi station master was charged with negligence because he allegedly had allowed the freight train to remain in the station rather than move it off the main line, police said.
Villagers as far as five miles away heard the impact of the trains, officials said.
More than 200 people were killed and 600 to 700 others were injured, many of them critically, they said.
Bodies, injured people and wreckage were scattered along the sides of the tracks, with virtually the entire express destroyed, said A.S. Jaffrey, a witness contacted by telephone.
"It is a horrible scene. You cannot recognize the engine. It is completely in pieces," Jaffrey said.
He said the eighth car of the express was partially buried and troops were using blow torches to cut into the exposed mangled portion to rescue crying passengers and extract corpses.
Police said most of the station staff were away, having gone to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's hometown of Larkhana to participate in celebrations Saturday to mark the birthday of her late father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.