By Jibran Ahmad
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) – Eight children in northern Pakistan were killed by a landslide while playing cricket after monsoon rains, officials said on Friday, a year after unprecedented floods wrecked havoc in the South Asian country.
They said the incident took place in the remote Shangla district on Thursday evening and the children were all aged between 12 and 15.
Nearly 15 of them had set up a cricket pitch close to a sand rock when it collapsed after a spell of rain and buried them, the district emergency unit officer Sanaullah Khan told Reuters.
Local rescue teams, later joined by the Pakistan army, pulled out eight bodies after hours of effort, he said. One of the remaining children was critically injured, while the rest were unharmed.
Another official, Bilal Khan, said the villagers who first rushed to the site were very helpful before the rescue teams arrived.
The abnormal monsoon rains and glacial melt in Pakistan last season had caused historical flooding from the mountainous northern ranges to the southern plains, killing over 1,700 people, displacing millions and inflicting billions of dollars in losses.
The country’s disaster management authorities have already issued alerts of heavy rains, raising risks of fresh flooding for the current monsoon season.
(Writing by Asif Shahzad; Editing by Devika Syamnath)
