Fuel tanker blast in western Iran kills at least 10

At least six other people were injured in the tanker blast on Iran’s Hamedan-Sanandaj highway, officials say.

At least 10 people were killed in a fuel tanker blast in western Iran, Iranian national broadcast media (IRIB) reported.

The tanker explosion on Saturday was triggered by a road crash on the Hamedan-Sanandaj highway.

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The accident was caused by a technical fault in the braking system of the vehicle carrying the tanker, said the governor of Sanandaj, the capital of Iran’s Kurdistan province, as reported by the Reuters news agency.

At least six other people were injured in the incident, the governor also said, adding that casualty figures were based on initial reports.

According to local officials, the resulting fire was immediately brought under control. They did not provide further details on the identities of those killed.

The latest deadly accident adds to a long history of deadly tanker and bus collisions in Iran, where poor road conditions, ageing vehicle fleets and heavy freight traffic have made such accidents a recurring hazard.

At least 13 people were killed in 2018, after a fuel tanker slammed into a bus that had stopped to pick up passengers near Sanandaj.

UNICEF said Iran’s rate of traffic crashes is 20 times the world’s average, as the country suffers from poor roads and lax traffic enforcement.

According to a May 2017 report by the Tehran-based newspaper Financial Tribune, more than 20,000 people are killed and 800,000 are injured annually in road accidents in Iran.