Three children lost their lives and five were injured as a dumper truck ran them over in Abbottabad on Friday at around 8am, police said.

Abbottabad police spokesperson Azam Mir Afzal told Dawn.com, “The accident took place as the school children were crossing the road near the Lady Garden public park.”

Afzal said a first information report was registered against the driver who fled the scene. The dumper had also been seized, he added.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Rescue 1122 spokesperson Bilal Ahmad Faizi said, “A rescue team was immediately dispatched to the accident site after receiving information about the incident. The bodies of the deceased, as well as the injured children, were taken to the district headquarters hospital.”

Following the incident, family members of the children and local residents staged a protest and blocked the Old Karakoram Highway, police spokesperson Afzal said.

They were demanding the arrest of the dumper truck’s driver, Afzal said, adding that the protest ended after negotiations and assurance by the police that the driver would be arrested.

Accidents involving dumpers are common in Pakistan, often linked to reckless driving, overloading, and poor vehicle maintenance, combined with weak enforcement of traffic laws. Many dumper drivers lack proper training, drive long hours without rest, or speed aggressively on congested roads, making it difficult to control such heavy vehicles.

In August, two siblings were killed and their father was injured in a road accident involving a dumper on Karachi’s Rashid Minhas Road.

In July, at least five people were killed in a collision between a car and a truck in KP’s Dera Ismail Khan district.

A young man and a woman also died in a road accident in February in Lahore when their car collided with a dumper. Both of them suffered multiple head and neck injuries which proved fatal.