At least 40 people, most of them Afghan refugees, were killed as torrential rains lashed the rugged north western tribal belt bordering Afghanistan on Thursday, officials said. The deaths in the Khyber tribal district came days after a tropical cyclone ravaged the country's south west and storms lashed Karachi, killing a total of more than 250 people.
Eight refugees were buried when their mud-brick house collapsed in Landikotal, the main town in the district and the last before the famous Khyber Pass border crossing, a local administration official said.
Three other refugees were swept away and killed when a bridge on the Peshawar-Kabul highway near the town collapsed due to the rain and sent their truck plummeting into a canal.
Two local women and a child were drowned in a rain-swollen river in Landikotal while a couple was reported killed in a house collapse in the town, he said on condition of anonymity.
The rain flooded a large part of the town, uprooted power pylons and snapped telephone lines, the official said. "Water also flooded the local police jail and we had to shift the prisoners to another government building," he added.
Heavy rains began in NWFP early in the morning and damaged houses and crops in the suburbs of the provincial capital Peshawar, they said. Parts of central Punjab were also hit by the downpour with several roads flooding in Islamabad.
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