Bus crash in Pakistan’s Dana Sar kills multiple passengers

A bus traveling from Quetta to Peshawar crashed in the Dana Sar mountain range, adding fresh casualties to a road network that has repeatedly turned deadly for long-distance passengers in Balochistan. The crash immediately fit a pattern that has already claimed dozens of lives on the province’s mountainous highways, where steep drops, difficult terrain and heavy passenger traffic have made intercity travel especially dangerous.

The Dana Sar range was already known as a fatal stretch of road before this latest crash. Dawn has documented a Quetta-bound passenger coach that fell into a ravine there on July 4, 2022, showing that the same mountain route has seen deadly wrecks before. The latest crash now places Dana Sar back at the center of a problem that has never been solved: buses carrying packed loads of passengers through routes built for punishing conditions and little margin for error.

Balochistan has seen several mass-casualty bus accidents in recent years. In May 2024, a Quetta-bound bus fell into a ravine in Washuk district, killing at least 28 people and injuring 22. Another crash near Quetta’s Brewery Road Bypass area in 2024 killed seven passengers and injured 19 more. In a separate crash in southwest Pakistan, officials said 18 people were killed, including women and children. Taken together, the cases show that these are not isolated tragedies but a recurring public-safety failure across the region.

The danger is most acute on mountain roads linking Balochistan with Pakistan’s north and northwest, where long routes, sharp curves and ravines magnify the consequences of overcrowding, weak vehicle oversight and inconsistent enforcement. Bus accidents on these roads have become a grim feature of intercity travel, with each new wreck exposing the same vulnerabilities: passengers packed into vehicles that must navigate some of the country’s hardest terrain, often with fatal results.

For families in Quetta, Peshawar and towns across Balochistan, the losses stretch beyond the crash scene. Each disaster leaves behind injured survivors, grieving households and another reminder that safer transport on these routes has not kept pace with the risks. The Dana Sar crash now joins a record of preventable deaths that keeps returning to the same mountain roads.