An ambulance carries injured victims of a fiery accident involving two buses and a fuel tanker Sunday on the main highway linking Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, and the southern city of Kandahar. (AP / RAHMATULLAH NIKZAD )

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Two buses and a fuel tanker collided Sunday on a key highway in Afghanistan, killing 52 people, officials said.

The buses were traveling one behind the other from Kabul to Kandahar when the accident happened, said Mohammadullah Ahmadi, director of the provincial traffic department. He blamed the crash on reckless driving.

Ahmadi said local residents helped firefighters and first responders pull survivors from the wreckage.

Another 73 people who had been on the buses were injured in the accident, which set all three vehicles ablaze, said Jawed Salangi, spokesman for the governor of the eastern Ghazni province.

Records show the two buses were carrying a total of 125 passengers, Salangi said.

"With 73 survivors out of the 125, 52 people are dead," he said, adding that the survivors had been transferred to hospitals.

As for identifying the victims, Ismail Kawusi, a spokesman for Afghanistan's Ministry of Health, said that many of the remains were badly burned and body parts were scattered around the accident site.

"It takes time, and only forensic medicine will be able to identify them," Kawusi said.

The collision happened at 7 a.m. on the main highway linking the capital, Kabul, to the southern city of Kandahar. Salangi said the road had been cleared and reopened by early afternoon.

Hamidullah Nawroz, head of Ghazni's provincial council, told The New York Times that a total of 111 people were either killed or injured, but because the victims were taken to many hospitals in different cities, many died on the way and the number of fatalities was hard to determine.

Nawroz also told the Times that a bus full of passengers had tried to pass a slow-moving fuel tanker and crashed head-on into another fully loaded bus coming from the opposite direction. Both buses then collided with the fuel tanker, which exploded and engulfed all three vehicles in flames, Nawroz said.

The discrepancies between the crash narratives and casualty tolls could not immediately be reconciled.

Road accidents are common in Afghanistan, where roads are often in poor condition and traffic laws are rarely enforced.

Information for this article was contributed by Rahim Faiez of The Associated Press and by Rod Nordland, Jawad Sukhanyar and Mujib Mashal of The New York Times.

A Section on 05/09/2016