The bus was carrying 51 Pakistani pilgrims traveling to Iraq for the Arbaeen commemoration, one of the most important events in the Shiite calendar, when it overturned and caught fire near a checkpoint in Iran’s Yazd province on Tuesday night, according to Iranian state television.
The bodies were transported from Yazd to an airfield in southern Pakistan, the region where most of the victims hailed from and where their pilgrimage had initially begun.
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On Friday night, the coffins, each draped with the Pakistani flag, arrived in the city of Jacobabad shortly before midnight, as witnessed by an AFP journalist. A fleet of ambulances then carried the bodies to their respective hometowns.
The injured pilgrims were transferred to hospitals in Karachi for medical treatment.
Among the deceased were 11 women and 17 men, as reported by Ali Malek-zadeh, the crisis management chief for Yazd province.
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The head of Iran’s traffic police, Teymour Hosseini, attributed the cause of the crash to a brake failure and the steepness of the road.
Arbaeen marks the 40th day of mourning for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed. Last year, approximately 22 million pilgrims participated in the commemoration in the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala, where Imam Hussein and his brother Abbas are buried, according to official reports.
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