At least 28 people have died after a bus carrying Shia pilgrims from Pakistan overturned in Iran‘s Yazd province.
The bus was carrying 51 passengers, all Pakistani nationals, on Tuesday night when it overturned and crashed outside the city of Taft, nearly 500km southeast of the capital Tehran.
Police say their initial investigations point to an issue with the bus’s brakes as being the cause of the crash.
Another 23 people suffered injuries in the crash, with 14 of them in a critical state, said Mohammad Ali Malekzadeh, a local emergency official.
Pakistan’s consular services in Iran have been invited to Yazd province to follow up on the accident.
Syed Athar Shamsi, the leader of the convoy that left from Larkana in Pakistan’s Sindh province for the pilgrimage, said that the group was spread out in two buses. The bus in front was the one that crashed, he told GeoTV.
In images broadcast by Iranian state TV, the bus could be seen turned upside down on the highway with its roof smashed in and all its doors open. Rescuers stepped gingerly through the broken glass and debris littering the road.
The pilgrims were traveling through Iran to reach Iraq’s Karbala to partake in the Arbaeen rituals, observed mostly by Shias.
Millions of believers converge each year for the Arbaeen, regarded as the largest annual public gathering in the world.
Arbaeen, Arabic for the number 40, marks the anniversary of the 40th day of mourning following the seventh-century death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein at the hands of the Muslim Umayyad forces in the Battle of Karbala, during the tumultuous first century of Islam’s history.
So far 25,000 Pakistanis have entered Iran to reach Karbala, Iran International reported.
Pakistan’s foreign minister Ishaq Dar offered his condolences to the bereaved families of the dead pilgrims. “I have given instructions to our ambassador in Tehran to ascertain exact situation and provide swift medical relief and recovery services as well as arrange repatriation of dead bodies to Pakistan,” he said in a post on X.
Iran has one of the world’s worst traffic safety records, with some 17,000 deaths annually. This high toll is blamed on a wide disregard for traffic laws, unsafe vehicles and inadequate emergency services in its vast rural areas.
An unrelated bus crash early on Wednesday in Iran’s southeastern Sistan and Baluchestan province killed six people and injured 18, authorities said.