Pakistan bus crash leaves 42 dead

A speeding passenger bus smashed into a tractor-trailer in southernPakistan Sunday, killing 42 people including 14 children and injuring more than adozen others with many in critical condition, police said.Several passengers were trapped inside the pink bus that was left badly mangledafter the high-speed crash in the town of Sukkur, 425 kilometres (266 miles) north ofKarachi in the province of Sindh.Excavators were used to pull the tractor-trailer from the bus, as rescuers struggledto pull out the stranded passengers.One eyewitness said he saw several passengers pleading for help."They were screaming and shouting: 'save us, save us'," he told reporters.Muhammad Faisal, a senior police official, said: "Most of the passengers weretrapped between their seats, we rescued them by cutting the bus body with metalcutters."He said the speeding bus was trying to overtake the tractor-trailer when it veeredout of control. The collision was so severe, he added, that 25 passengers died on thespot. The dead included six members of a 10-member family who were travelling on thebus to visit their relatives in Karachi."We were ten members of one family. Six of them died," said 18-year-old MaryamBibi, weeping. Bibi survived the crash along with her six-year-old brother.The dead included 14 children and 13 women, said Fida Hussain Shah, a seniorSukkur police officer, adding that the bus driver was killed on the spot while thedriver of the tractor-trailer sustained serious injuries.Shah confirmed that over speeding by the bus was the cause of the accident.Most of the 17 injured were in critical condition and several were transferred to ahospital in Karachi after initial treatment in Sukkur.Pakistan has one of the world's worst records for fatal traffic accidents due to poor roads, badly maintained vehicles and reckless driving.Sixteen people were killed and 49 injured when an overloaded truck crashed into aravine earlier this month in the central province of Punjab.  A collision between two buses and a petrol tanker killed 35 people in southwestPakistan in late March.