RAHIM YAR KHAN: A day after a tragic watercraft accident in the Indus River near Rahim Yar Khan took the lives of over two dozen people, at least 26 people were laid to rest in their native village Hussain Bakhsh Solangi near Machke in Sindh, and 27 were still unaccounted for despite rescue efforts.
Clan chief Sardar Abbas Khan Solangi, who was present for the funeral rituals, said that prayers for at least 26 persons, including two children and a woman whose bodies were later found, were offered at their family burial.Mr. Solangi claimed compensation from the governments of Sindh and Punjab (where the incident occurred), blaming them for failing to build bridges in the region, which forced residents to utilise beaten-down wooden boats to cross the river.
Despite more than a day having passed since the event, dozens of people were still unaccounted for, and their loved ones waited on the banks of the Indus River in the hopes that the rescue effort undertaken to find the last bodies would be successful.
Rescuers, however, had little success on Tuesday. According to the Rahim Yar Khan deputy commissioner, a group of 18 Pakistani Army divers from Mangla also arrived there to assist with the rescue effort.On Monday, as a wedding group was travelling back to Machke from Khrore village in two boats, an accident happened.
A cousin of the groom told Dawn that one of the boats capsized due to overloading when one of the hull planks broke. Muhammad Hussain claimed that the majority of his family’s drowning victims were women and children because only the men were first saved. Eight members of a single family, all of them belonging to the Solangi clan, drowned in the disaster, according to Mr. Hussain.
