Iran tanker crash kills dozens
TEHRAN, Iran -- A truck carrying gasoline has crashed into six buses full of passengers, killing up to 90 people and wounding 114 others in southeastern Iran, Red Cross officials have told state media.
Most of those killed in Thursday night's accident at a police checkpoint in Nosratabad, about 1,100 kilometers (690 miles) southeast of the capital Tehran, were women and children waiting inside the buses, according to media reports.
Nosratabad lies on the road from Zahedan to Bam, which was hit by an earthquake last year that killed more than 20,000 people.
"The disaster is so grave we cannot identify faces and cannot differentiate between corpses," Haidar Ali Nourai, governor of the southeastern city of Zahedan, told state television, according to Reuters.
He said the accident happened when the truck was unable to stop and smashed into a bus waiting at a police checkpoint in Nosratabad. The fireball then enveloped five other buses.
The victims were burnt to death due to a lack of firefighting equipment at the police station in Nosratabad, local officials told Iranian television.
Iranian television broadcast pictures of the survivors crying and slapping themselves in the face as a ritual of mourning.
The tanker was carrying more than 4,500 gallons (17,000 liters) of gas when it lost control.
Trucks and buses often wait outside police stations on highways in southeastern Iran to be inspected for drugs and other contraband.
Zahedan parliamentarian Hossein Ali Shahriari said the checkpoint was badly sited on a sharp bend.
"Inspections at this checkpoint use stone-age methods," he told the ISNA student new agency.
"We always see lots of buses and cars caught in queues at this road block."
Iran has one of the world's worst rates for road accidents. There were more than 400,000 crashes and 21,000 deaths on its roads in 2002.
Four months ago, nearly 200 people lost their lives when a runaway train carrying fuel and chemicals careened off the tracks and exploded, leveling several nearby villages in northeastern Iran.
The high tolls are blamed on unsafe vehicles, disregard of traffic laws and inadequate emergency services.
CNN freelancer Shirzad Bozorgmehr in Tehran contributed to this report.
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Associated Press contributed to this report.
