More than 120 people lost their lives and hundreds were injured when three passenger trains crashed into each other in Pakistan early today.
About 1,000 people were aboard each of the trains and many of the passengerswere asleep at the time of the pre-dawn disaster.
Passengers who were travelling in Lahore-Karachi-bound traincollect their belongings after the accident at Ghotki
Pakistan's worst train disaster in more than a decade left the scene covered with twisted steel from at least 13 derailed cars. Officials said body parts were strewn about and emergency crews had to cut through metal to reach some victims.
"So far, we have taken out at least 120 bodies," police official Shabbir Billo told journalists from near the scene of the crash near Ghotki, a small town in southern Sindh province.
"It is a very gruesome situation," police chief Agha Mohammed Tahir told journalists. "Rescue workers have started to pull the dead and injured out. There were many people inside and there are a lot of casualties."
Survivors described being awoken to the horror after being thrown from their beds and seats.
Abdul Wahab Awan, general manager of Pakistan Railways, said officials on the scene had told him more than 100 people were dead and hundreds more injured.
Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, the national head of the Crisis Management Center at the Interior Ministry, ruled out sabotage, saying the crash was "a pure accident."
"We cannot give a figure for the death toll and a rescue operation is going on," he added.
The crash happened at about 4 a.m. when a train sitting in a station near the Sindh province city of Ghotki was hit in the rear by a second train, the Karachi Express. A third, oncoming train then slammed into cars derailed in the first crash, said Abdul Aziz, a senior controller at Pakistan Railways.
Chaudhry Nazir Ahmed, a railroad official in Ghotki, said about a thousand people were believed to be traveling in the three trains.
Some 30 bodies and over 100 injured people were taken to the Civil Hospital in the nearby town of Sukkur, said Iqbal Ahmed, a doctor there. He said at least 12 of the injured were in critical condition, and that some had lost limbs or suffered massive head injuries.
Awan said the driver of the Karachi Express misread a signal.
"The crash occurred because of misreading of a signal by the driver of Karachi Express and it rammed the Quetta Express, which was not moving," Awan told the press.
The injured were taken in ambulances and private car to area hospitals. Special trains were being sent to take stranded survivors to their destinations, officials said.
Ghotki is about 370 miles northeast of Karachi, in remote Sindh province.
The Quetta Express was carrying passengers from the eastern city of Lahore to the southwestern city of Quetta when it developed a technical problem and stopped at the station.
Technicians were working on the train when the Karachi Express, a night-coach from Lahore traveling to the southern port city of Karachi plowed into it.
The impact pushed cars onto an adjacent track where they were hit by the oncoming Tezgam Express, which was taking passengers from Karachi north to Rawalpindi, near the capital of Islamabad.
Pakistan's railways are antiquated, and dozens of people have been killed in train accidents in recent years. Ghotki has been a particularly dangerous point in the network and the site of repeated accidents over the years.
A train carrying 800 passengers from Karachi to Lahore slammed into a parked freight train at Ghotki on June 8, 1991, killing more than 100 people. Authorities blamed staff negligence for that accident.
In December 1989, a train crash near Sangi, a town 35 miles from Ghotki, killed 400 people.
AP