What Happened Near Nokkundi
Nine Afghan nationals died, and at least 10 more were injured, when an oil tanker ran into a pickup truck in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan. Pakistani media reported the crash on the Sunday, and Khaama Press, in an account by Fidel Rahmati dated December 22, 2025, carried the details. The collision took place near Nokkundi, a remote town in Chagai district not far from the Iran border.
The detail that explains the death toll came from Mohammad Sharif, who leads the police in Chagai district. He said the tanker struck the pickup with significant force, and that all nine people riding in the smaller vehicle died at the scene. The wounded were rushed to nearby medical facilities, and police added that several of them remain in serious condition because of how severe their injuries are.
Who Was in the Pickup
Authorities confirmed that every person killed was an Afghan national who had entered Pakistan illegally and was trying to move on toward Iran and, in time, Europe through smuggling networks. The area around Nokkundi is one that migrants use often, travelling along unofficial and hazardous routes, as local authorities describe it.
For families across the region, that is the detail that turns a traffic report into something harder: the nine who died at the scene were not local commuters but people mid-journey on a route that offered no protection, no contract and no recourse when a tanker and a pickup met on a desert road.
The Pattern Behind One Crash
The backdrop, as international media and migration organisations tell it, is that irregular migration out of Afghanistan has climbed sharply since the Taliban took power in 2021. The drivers are a collapsed economy, unemployment and a shortage of work at home. Human rights groups warn that people on informal routes through Pakistan and Iran can face human trafficking, abuse and fatal road accidents along the way, and this crash sits squarely inside that warning.
The numbers on record, as of the reports: nine dead at the scene, all Afghan nationals, and at least 10 injured, several of them serious, in hospitals near a remote border district. What happens next follows the pattern such cases usually take: police documentation, treatment for the injured, and the quiet continuation of a route that has now claimed nine more travelers close to the Iran border.
What it means for people closer to the ground in Chagai district is simpler and starker. A smuggling road through the desert carried a pickup full of passengers toward a border, and an oil tanker ended the journey there, at Nokkundi, before any of them reached the country they were heading for.
