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"Three buses were racing. One of them rammed into an oil
tanker," police official Imran Shaukat told Reuters, describing
the incident on a motorway near the central city of Multan.
The crash triggered a fire that engulfed both the tanker and the
bus, he said. The oil tanker was beyond identification to
determine what company it belongs to, he said.
A spokesman for the motorway police said the tanker's driver
fled the scene.
Officials from a state-run rescue service said the bus was bound
for the southern port city of Karachi. The rescue service
identified the operator as the Daewoo bus company and said at
least 20 passengers had died, some of them burnt completely.
An employee who answered the phone at Daewoo's Lahore office
confirmed that its bus was involved in the incident and that the
driver was among the dead. Senior officials at the company were
not available for comment.
Six passengers survived, an official of the rescue service told
Dunya TV.
"The fire was raging when we got here," he said, adding that
most of the passengers were caught by the fire in their sleep.
Deadly road accidents are common in Pakistan, mainly due to
speeding and poor road infrastructure. An oil tanker overturned
and caught fire in 2017 in the region, killing more than 100
people.
(Additional Reporting by Syed Raza Hasan in Karachi; Writing by
Asif Shahzad; Editing by Stephen Coates and Peter Graff)
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