Hafizabad bus crash: 5 killed, 27 injured as bus plunges into drain
File photo: A passenger bus in Lahore — not the bus involved in the crash.
Five people were killed and 27 injured when a passenger bus plunged into a drain in Punjab’s Hafizabad district early on Thursday morning. The crash happened in the Fatehke area of Pindi Bhattian tehsil, where the bus, headed for Chiniot, veered off the road and fell into a drainage channel.
What happened in the early hours
Rescue 1122 received the emergency call at 4:20am, according to The Express Tribune, and teams from Pindi Bhattian — ambulances, motorcycle rescue units and fire services — reached the scene immediately. Dawn reported that the driver lost control because of overspeeding, while eyewitnesses cited by Rescue 1122 said the driver had grown drowsy while making a U-turn. Rescue workers gave first aid at the scene and shifted 20 injured passengers to the Tehsil Headquarters Hospital in Pindi Bhattian. With help from the local administration, a crane lifted the overturned bus out of the drain, and the bodies of five passengers were recovered from beneath it and taken to the same hospital. The operation, supervised by District Emergency Officer Engineer Abdul Rasheed, has been declared complete, though rescuers had kept searching for a time amid fears that more passengers might still be trapped under the wreckage.
Who the victims were
Rescue 1122 identified the dead as 18-year-old Ahmad, son of Abdul Rauf; 20-year-old Adil, son of Arshid; 26-year-old Mazakar Mubeen, son of Nisar Ahmad; 27-year-old Arslan Farooq, son of Farooq; and 28-year-old Muhammad Ali, son of Sahab Khan. All five were young men between 18 and 28, setting out on an early-morning journey they would not complete.
The third deadly bus crash in a matter of days
The tragedy is the latest in a grim run of bus crashes on Pakistan’s roads. Last week, 12 passengers were killed and more than two dozen injured when a minibus and a passenger coach collided head-on near Zero Point on the Quetta-Karachi highway. Days earlier, on 21 October, a bus overturned after hitting a road divider on the Indus Highway in Rojhan tehsil, Rajanpur district, killing 10 people and injuring 44. Back in June 2026, a speeding van plunged into a canal near the Dharampura-Chaubacha crossing in Lahore, injuring seven. The pattern keeps raising the same question: until speeding and driver fatigue are brought under control, how safe is travel on Punjab’s roads?
