Fuel tanker blast on the Sanandaj-Hamedan road kills 12

A fuel tanker exploded on the Sanandaj-Hamedan road in western Iran on Saturday, 5 September, after hitting other vehicles near a traffic police station. State news agency IRNA first put the dead at 11 and the injured at seven. IRIB reported on Sunday that the death toll had risen to 12. The injured were taken to a hospital in Sanandaj.

IRNA cited a faulty brake system. Babak Hodaei, head of emergency medical services at Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences, said the fire spread to several nearby cars and that rescue work was still under way. The site is about 400 kilometres west of Tehran, on the intercity road between Sanandaj County in Kurdistan province and Hamedan County.

The presidential order

President Masoud Pezeshkian posted on X on Sunday with condolences to families in Kurdistan province and an instruction for an immediate investigation, urgent care for the injured and support for the bereaved. First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref called Kurdistan Governor Arash Zerehtan and asked for an expert report to the government, treatment of the wounded, help for families and insurance cover for the dead and injured, including people who went to the scene to help.

Those orders are the official response. They do not yet include a mechanical finding. A brake failure on a loaded fuel tanker is a specific claim. It will stand or fall on whatever the inquiry produces about the vehicle’s service history and about how close the wreck sat to the police post.

A road that has seen this before

In 2018 a fuel tanker and an intercity passenger bus collided near Sanandaj and killed 15 people, with four injured. The Associated Press, writing on Sunday’s crash, noted that road accidents kill more than 17,000 people a year in Iran. The usual list of causes in that reporting is old vehicles, weak enforcement and thin emergency cover on intercity roads.

A tanker fire next to a police station is a particular kind of scene. The post is where traffic is supposed to be slowed and checked. If the brakes failed on the approach, the station became part of the blast radius instead of a control point. Hodaei’s note that helpers at the scene should be in the insurance order is a small signal that civilians, not only passengers in the hit cars, were close enough to burn.

Kurdistan province sits on routes that carry fuel between western depots and the rest of the plateau. That traffic is ordinary until a tank ruptures. Sunday’s figures are 12 dead and seven in hospital. Pezeshkian’s inquiry, if it publishes, should say whether the tanker should have been on that road with those brakes. Until then the record is the IRNA and IRIB tallies and a president’s post asking for a cause.