Ten people have been killed by an oxygen cylinder explosion inside an ambulance parked at a government medical centre in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province.
Hiru News reported at 4.55 p.m. Colombo time on Thursday that the blast occurred the previous night at a medical centre in Tharparkar district, citing foreign media reports.
The ambulance was stationary at the facility when the cylinder detonated.
Who was killed
District police chief Arif Aziz said the dead include staff of the medical centre, patients and patients’ relatives — a spread that reflects where the ambulance was standing rather than who was travelling in it.
Police officer Khalil Abro said the explosion happened while patients were being transferred to another hospital. That detail places people around the open vehicle at the moment it blew up, which accounts for the number of casualties from a single cylinder.
Tharparkar is a largely rural desert district in the south-east of Sindh, on the Indian border, with limited local hospital capacity — transfers to better-equipped facilities elsewhere are routine there.
Official response
President Asif Ali Zardari has expressed grief over the deaths and asked the authorities to conduct a swift and transparent investigation into the cause of the explosion.
Not reported
The filing does not name the medical centre, give the number of injured, or say whether anyone remains in a critical condition. It does not identify any of the dead, or say how many were staff as against patients or relatives.
Nothing is reported on what caused the cylinder to explode — whether a fault, a handling error, heat or a filling defect — or on whether the ambulance belonged to the medical centre, a government service or a charitable operator. No filing says whether the vehicle’s engine was running, or whether other cylinders were aboard.
On sourcing: Hiru attributes the account to foreign media without naming an outlet. Searches of the verified international newsrooms that return content to this desk found no matching report, and the named officials, district and casualty figure rest on Hiru’s filing alone. This is a single-source story and is published as such; the details above should be read as that outlet’s account rather than as independently confirmed.
Hiru dates the explosion to “last night.” This desk has previously recorded that Hiru measures relative day-words against its own filing date rather than the event date when relaying foreign reports, so the blast is placed on the night of 28–29 October on that basis, not on an explicit date in the filing.
