Three perish as truck topples off KPT Interchange

Three people were killed and two others injured as a trailer truck carrying a shipping container toppled off the Karachi Port Trust Interchange, Qayyumabad, on Thursday afternoon – the sixth major accident in the metropolis over the past 14 days which raised the two-week death toll to 18.

According to officials, the dead include one woman and two men, while the injured were two children. The accident, as per eyewitness reports, occurred when the truck was moving from Qayyumabad towards the Korangi Crossing area.

Police Surgeon Aijaz Khokhar identified two of the dead as 25-year-old Amar Baksh and 35-year-old Robin Mushtaq Masih. The woman’s identity was still unknown but Khokhar said she was around 45 years old. The bodies and the injured were taken to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre. 

Despite the plunge off the bridge, the truck driver, amazingly, survived and managed to flee the scene. 

DIG Traffic Asif Ijaz Sheikh said that teams were out on the field to arrest the man.

As for the cause of the accident, the DIG said they were yet to pinpoint a reason as one of the truck’s tyres had also burst. The police official said he had spoken to eyewitnesses who maintain that the truck was speeding. However, he reiterated that the actual cause would only be determined after proper investigations.

The nature of the accident and the vehicle involved led to much talk about the lax implementation of a ban repeatedly imposed by authorities on the movement of heavy vehicles within the city.

As per the city’s traffic regulations, trucks transporting containers are only allowed to move through the metropolis after 10pm – this law too, though, has fallen prey to the pitfalls of slack implementation. 

However, DIG Shaikh stated that the truck involved in yesterday’s mishap was a 20-foot, 10-wheeler vehicle that does not come under the category banned from daytime movement. 

“We will be writing to the relevant authorities to add these vehicles to the list of heavy traffic as well,” he said, adding that there were also alternate routes earmarked for these vehicles. 

Traffic accidents are frequently occurring in Karachi as its major roads have been dug up for reconstruction or other developments projects without providing proper alternate routes to motorists.

A day earlier, three people were killed and two others injured when a taxi overturned on Wednesday at Garden Interchange – the track which joins the two sides of Lyari Expressway.

The victims were taken to the Civil Hospital Karachi. Three of them, 50-year-old Saeed Qaleemullah, 60-year-old Syed Sawleh Muhammad and 50-year-old Syed Faiz Muhammad, succumbed to their injuries, while 45-year-old Haji Abdul Huq and 15-year- old Naveed Ullah were admitted for treatment.

On Tuesday, six people were killed and 27 others injured when a speeding Tando Bagho-bound bus smashed into a column of Sassui Toll Plaza on National Highway.

Police and witnesses said the bus driver tried to overtake an oil tanker when the brakes of the vehicle failed and it crashed into the column.

On February 3, a minibus had hit three pedestrians, killing one of them, a woman, on the scene. One of the injured people, Hunza Khan, a student of the Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science and Technology after battling for life at a private hospital for nine days passed away on Friday.

Then on February 9, a speeding minibus overturned at a bus stop near the Baitul Mukkaram mosque in Gulshan-e-Iqbal, killing three more Fuuast students, Rabia Hussain, 20, Kiran Zafar, 21, and Amna Batool, and a man.

The vehicle fell on them while they were waiting at the bus stop.

Police had police impounded the minibus but driver and conductor managed to escape.

The next day on February 10, a university student, Ghulamullah Khan, 25, died when he fell from a moving bus and came under its wheels on the bumpy Business Recorder Road. ­