PESHAWAR, Pakistan, May 21 (AFP) - A bomb attack Saturday on a NATO fuel tanker headed to Afghanistan sparked a huge fire that killed 15 people who had been scrambling to collect petrol leaking out from the bombed-out vehicle.
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| Residents survey the charred truck that was hit by the bomb. Reuters |
The dead were all civilians, nine of them from the same family near Landi Kotal town in the lawless northwestern Pakistan tribal region of Khyber, local administration official Shafeerullah Wazir told AFP.
The attack came hours after the Taliban bombed a US consulate convoy in Peshawar on Friday, killing one person and wounding 11 others in the first such attack on Americans in Pakistan since Osama bin Laden's death on May 2.
“The oil tanker caught fire after a blast caused by a small bomb before dawn,” Wazir said, noting that the fire was initially put out before villagers rushed from nearby houses rushed and started collecting fuel from the tanker.
“Suddenly the fire erupted again and at least 15 people including five young boys who had been collecting oil in their buckets were burnt to death,” he said.
The dead included a nine-year-old child and other victims aged between 18 and 30, local official Nabi Khan told AFP.
They were collecting petrol to be sold later in the open market where one litre fetches around 100 rupees (about 1.2 dollars), he said.
Their funeral prayers were held en masse, residents said.
Earlier, 11 other NATO supply vehicles, “most of them oil tankers” were destroyed at a terminal in nearby Torkham town, another administration official, Iqbal Khattak, said, but there were no casualties. “The vehicles caught fire after a blast in one of the tankers around midnight,” he said, adding that the explosion was apparently caused by a remote-controlled device placed under one of the parked vehicles. |
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