Three-train crash kills more than 100
Karachi, Pakistan Three passenger trains crashed in a southern Pakistan station early today, killing more than 100 people and injuring hundreds more, officials said.
Pakistan’s deadliest train wreck in more than a decade left the station yard covered with twisted wreckage. Officials said body parts were strewn about and rescuers were forced to cut through metal to reach some victims.
“It is a very gruesome situation,” police chief Agha Mohammed Tahir told the Associated Press. “Rescue workers have started to pull the dead and injured out. There were many people inside and there are a lot of casualties.”
The chain-reaction crash started about 4 a.m. when a train sitting in a station near the Sindh province city of Ghotki was rear-ended by a second train, the Karachi Express. Cars from the trains derailed and slammed into a third, oncoming train, said Abdul Aziz, a senior controller at Pakistan Railways.
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.
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 Associated Press.
Suicide bomber strikes outside shopping mall
Netanya, Israel A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up outside a shopping mall in this seaside town Tuesday, killing three other people, injuring dozens more and shattering a long stretch of comparative calm in the weeks before Israel’s expected pullout from the Gaza Strip.
The early-evening attack was the first of its kind since the end of February and battered an already shaky truce declared that month by Palestinian militant groups, which agreed to observe a period of quiet up through Israel’s evacuation of Jewish settlements in Gaza and the northern West Bank.
Israeli and Palestinian officials quickly condemned the blast, describing it as an attempt to disrupt the withdrawal, scheduled to begin in the middle of next month.
“Once again we return to the same sights (of carnage),” Yaacov Edri, Israel’s deputy minister of internal security, told reporters at a hospital where some of the wounded were taken. “It’s unbelievable, but we knew that there would be those who would try to sabotage the disengagement process.”
The Israeli government has insisted that it will not carry out its “disengagement” plan under fire from Palestinian radicals, but officials said Tuesday the pullout would go on as planned.
A wing of the militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility, calling the attack retaliation for Israel’s continued pursuit of its members. But as of late Tuesday, the organization’s central leadership had not put out a formal statement affirming its involvement, as is customary with the group.
Defense minister wounded by bomb
Beirut, Lebanon A powerful bomb targeted the motorcade of Lebanon’s outgoing defense minister in a wealthy Christian suburb Tuesday, wounding the official and a dozen other people and killing a member of his entourage.
It was the first assassination attempt against a top official here since former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was killed by a car bomb in February.
The attack on Elias Murr signified a break in the pattern of bombings that have rattled Beirut in recent months. Until Tuesday, the people who were targeted for death have shared a common characteristic: They have been outspoken, even brazen, critics of Syria’s longtime domination over Lebanese affairs.
But Murr, a former interior minister, was tightly associated with allies of Damascus. His father is a staunch Syria supporter who won a seat in parliament in this spring’s elections. His father-in-law, President Emile Lahoud, is the highest-ranking member of the Lebanese government who has remained loyal to Syria.