Death toll rises in Pakistan flash floods
- 14 years ago
About 150 people have been killed by flashfloods and bad weather in Pakistan in the last week, with the country's northwest and Baluchistan provinces bearing the brunt of the storms, officials said.
In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province in the northwest, storms and flash floods caused by heavy monsoon rains killed nearly 80 people and left several thousands stranded.
About 70 people were killed in flash floods in the southwestern Baluchistan province last week, which also uprooted nearly 100,000 people.
Most of the most recent casualties were in the picturesque Swat valley in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province where torrential rains caused the Swat river to burst its bank.
Bad weather was likely also a factor in Wednesday's crash of AirBlue flight 202 in Islamabad, which killed 152 people.
Several thousand people in Swat and other parts of the provinces were either stranded or forced from their homes, officials said. Troops evacuated about 300 people from a village encircled by flood waters in the district of Tank.
Meteorologists in Pakistan say that the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province received between 250 mm and 300 mm of rain in the past 36 hours - the highest figure recorded in the last 35 years. They also said they expected more rain to fall in the next 24 hours.