The massacre of Ismaili Shia Muslims in the Pakistani city of Karachi was not only shocking because of its scale - but also because survivors who had been left for dead then had to drive themselves to hospital, the BBC reports.
About 60 people were on the Ismaili community bus when it was attacked.
Four gunmen, presumed to be members of one of Pakistan’s many Sunni militant groups, told them to lower their heads and gunned them down in a style reminiscent of the December massacre at Peshawar’s Army Public School.
At least 46 men and women were killed together in cold blood. And no rescue teams or ambulances turned up.
So, after the gunmen had left, one of the survivors came to life, crawled to the driver’s seat, got behind the wheel and drove the macabre contents of the blood-soaked vehicle to the nearest hospital - some 3km (two miles) away.
The attack happened in an area which once formed Karachi’s vast rural backyard.
In recent years property developers have acquired land to build housing schemes which are still scattered thinly and only slowly coming up.
One of them is al-Azhar Garden, a sprawling gated neighbourhood of Ismaili Muslims built by a community organisation and kept connected to the city centre by the community-run bus service.
Wednesday was just another ordinary morning in al-Azhar Garden. The residents were getting on their bus, preparing to traverse the north-eastern hinterland of Karachi as they normally did to get to their places of work in the centre of the city.
But within minutes the bus had been waylaid by the gunmen.
A police detective at the scene, Tariq Jadoon, was picking up some bits and pieces from the broken road and putting them in a plastic bag.
Most were empty cases of 9mm pistol and sub-machine gun rounds, strewn across potholes in the road, near some brown stains apparently caused by blood mixing with soil.
The detective had also just picked up a blue cap with the markings of a private security agency. “Perhaps the attackers were wearing uniforms of the security agency, that’s why the driver stopped the bus.”
There are no eyewitnesses at the moment to describe the attackers.
The driver and most of the passengers are dead. Those who survived are in a critical condition and have not been speaking to the media.
The police, who did speak to some of the survivors, said there were six attackers riding three motorbikes.
They flagged down the bus just a couple of kilometres from al-Azhar Garden, at a comparatively lonely spot along the University Road link, while heading towards the Karachi-Hyderabad motorway.
A woman passenger who police spoke to said one of the attackers had a clean-shaven face and was wearing trousers and a shirt, Geo TV reported.
She said they first singled out two children and asked them to leave the bus, then started shooting the passengers.
The whereabouts of the children are unknown at the moment.
One probable witness, the gatekeeper of a house near where the massacre took place, appears to know more than he is willing to share.
“I saw the bus coming in the distance, and heard the firing. It was scary, so I went in and closed the gate,” he told BBC Urdu.
“Then the bus stopped, right over there. The firing stopped. Then I heard people from the village gathering at the scene. I came out and I saw blood splashed across glass windows, and blood dripping from the doors.”
Qasim Ali, the general secretary of the al-Azhar Garden management community, says his relatives told him everybody in the bus was in a bad way. Most people appeared to be dead, but some were moaning. “Then one of our injured residents who knew how to drive the bus got behind the wheel and drove it to Memon Hospital, about 2-3km from the scene of the attack.”
The bus driver himself appears to have been killed and the conductor injured.
According to witnesses quoted by Pakistan’s Express Tribune, the conductor was shot in the head and the gunmen presumed he was dead.
The man who drove the bus full of bodies is being called a hero.