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MULTAN, Pakistan (AP) — Hundreds of mourners in various parts of southern Pakistan attended funerals for 28 Shiite pilgrims who were killed in a bus crash in Iran this week while heading to Iraq, community leaders and officials said.
The victims of the crash were later buried in various graveyards in the Sindh province, local Shiite leader Jaafar Hussain said.
The funerals took place hours after a military aircraft brought home the bodies and the injured on orders from Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. All the victims were from Sindh province, where the plane landed.
Authorities have not announced the cause of the crash near the city of Taft, some 500 kilometers (310 miles) southeast of the Iranian capital, Tehran.
In southern Pakistan, Zawaar Javed, the father of a man who died, said his son minutes before the crash sent him a message on WhatsApp, saying the brakes of bus had failed, and later he heard news about the accident.
In a state TV report, Mohammad Ali Malekzadeh, a local Iranian emergency official, also blamed the crash on the bus brakes failing and a lack of attention by the driver.
The Pakistani pilgrims had been on their way to Iraq’s holy city of Karbala, to commemorate Arbaeen — Arabic for the number 40 — marking the end of the annual 40-day mourning period after the date of the seventh century death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, a central figure in Shiite Islam.
Hussein died at the hands of the Muslim Umayyad forces in the Battle of Karbala, during the tumultuous first century of Islam’s history.