“Early this morning, 21 people were killed and 11 injured in an accident between a bus, a tanker truck and a motorcycle on a road” of the province of Helmand, the spokesperson for the governorate of this province in the south of the country announced to Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Sunday March 17.
The tanker truck was transporting gasoline, and during the collision, the cause of which is undetermined, the vehicles caught fire. The bodies of many victims were seriously burned, added the governor’s spokesperson.
The accident occurred in the Gerashk district, on the main road linking southern Kandahar province in the east to Herat province in the west, according to a statement from the authorities.
According to Hzatullah Haqqani, spokesperson for the local police chief, the eleven injured were taken to hospital. Still according to Mr. Haqqani, the accident also left 27 minor injuries.
The roads of Afghanistan, a country crossed by high mountain ranges and bled by four decades of fighting, are often deadly.
Thirty-one people died in December 2022 at the Salang pass (in the center of the country), in the Hindu Kush range, after a tanker overturned, setting other vehicles on fire .