According to official media on Monday, a bus transporting pilgrims from Pakistan collided with a truck in southern Iran, resulting in at least three fatalities and forty-eight injuries.
The pilgrims from Pakistan were traveling from Iran to Iraq to attend the Arbaeen celebration, which commemorates the 40th day of Imam Husain’s (PBUH) mourning.
According to Iran’s official news agency IRNA, there were “48 wounded and three dead” after a bus and a truck crashed late on Sunday on the main route between Sirjan in Kerman province and Neyriz city in Fars region.
The number of individuals on board the bus was not stated.
According to Colonel Abdol Hashem Dehghani, a Fars traffic police official cited by IRNA, the driver’s “inability to control the vehicle” and “a technical failure” in the brakes were the causes of the collision.
Neyriz Governor Yaqub Khosrawani was cited by Iran’s Mehr News Urdu as claiming that the event claimed the lives of four Pakistani pilgrims and injured thirty others.
This was the second vehicle disaster involving Pakistani pilgrims in less than a week, following a crash in Yazd, Iran, which claimed the lives of 28 people as they traveled to Iraq for Arbaeen.
The 28 pilgrims’ bodies were transported to Pakistan on a dedicated airplane on Friday evening.
Iran has a dismal record for road safety, with over 20,000 fatalities in collisions in the year ending in March 2024, according to data from the Legal Medicine Organization of the Iranian judiciary that was reported by regional media.
22 million pilgrims attended the Arbaeen celebration last year, according to government statistics.
According to IRNA, on August 19 of this year, over 25,000 pilgrims from Pakistan have crossed into Iran in order to travel to Karbala, an Iraqi shrine city where Imam Husain and his brother Abbas are interred.
