Five of Family Killed in Tando Adam Road Crash

Five members of a family, including two five-year-old boys, were killed and three women injured when a passenger coach and a car collided head-on on Tando Adam-Jhol Road in Sanghar district in the wee hours of Sunday.

The car was trapped beneath the coach, and the dead and injured remained pinned inside for hours. Police and local residents rushed to the scene, and the car had to be cut free from beneath the coach before the bodies could be retrieved and the injured rescued. The injured women were first taken to the taluka hospital, then referred to Hyderabad for further treatment. The coach driver fled the scene after the collision.

The coach was travelling from Karachi to Sanghar when it collided head-on with the car. The victims belonged to the village of Bilawal Khoso in New Saeedabad taluka of Matiari district, and were returning home after attending a charity feast in the village of Piro Faqir Shoro when the crash happened.

The victims

The dead were identified as 48-year-old Mano Kolhi, his 40-year-old wife Neelan, their 30-year-old son Ramoon, Ramoon’s five-year-old son Deval, and five-year-old Kanyo, identified in the police account as Ramoon’s nephew. Three women were injured: Roshni, Heeri, wife of Ramoon, and Gulabi.

After legal formalities were completed, the bodies were handed over to the bereaved family. The arrival of the five bodies in Bilawal Khoso plunged the village into grief, with anguished cries echoing through the bereaved household and a pall of mourning descending on the area.

The family is described as extremely poor and struggling to make ends meet. Social and civil society organisations have been appealing on social media for financial assistance to help cover the funeral expenses, as the family now faces the burden of arranging the latest victims’ last rites.

A family struck twice

This is not the first time tragedy of this kind has struck the same household. In 2019, seven young labourers from the same family were killed and several others seriously injured in a collision between a Qingqi rickshaw and a passenger coach near Wanjhari on the National Highway. Some of the survivors of that crash were left disabled.

The parallel between the two crashes is stark. Both involved a passenger coach. Both struck members of one poor household travelling together. And both left the family to bury several of its own at once, and to care for survivors with lasting injuries.

Road safety campaigners often point to cases like this when they argue that crash statistics hide a deeper pattern. When one family loses twelve members to two crashes in seven years, the question is not only about one driver on one night. It is about enforcement on the routes that poor, rural families travel, and about what happens to a coach driver who flees a crash scene.

The Chief Minister’s response

Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah expressed deep sorrow over the loss of lives, extended condolences to the bereaved families, and prayed for the speedy recovery of the injured. He directed the relevant authorities to ensure the best possible medical treatment for the injured, and expressed heartfelt sympathy with the families.

He also urged citizens and drivers to strictly observe traffic laws, and stressed the need to avoid overspeeding and reckless driving. The protection of human lives, he said, should be every citizen’s foremost priority. He called on drivers to operate vehicles carefully and within prescribed speed limits, warning that even a moment of negligence could lead to a fatal accident.

That warning is now the official response to a crash in which the coach driver fled, and in which the victims were trapped for hours beneath the larger vehicle. Whether it is followed by action against the driver, or by enforcement on the Tando Adam-Jhol Road, will determine whether the condolences are remembered as more than words.

For the village of Bilawal Khoso, the immediate reality is simpler and harder. Five bodies have come home, three women are in hospital in Hyderabad, and a family that buried seven of its young men in 2019 is burying five more of its members now.