Four victims of the crash at the Karwa bus station in downtown Doha on Friday have been identified as two Indian nationals and two expats from the Philippines.

Philippine nationals Acasar Barabay Arato, 50, and Marescia Mendoza Tanaid, a 30-year-old woman, were killed at the Al Ghanem bus station near Souq Waqif for bus 156 when the driver lost control and plowed into the waiting passengers at around 12:30pm on Friday.

Tanaid was working in Qatar as a housemaid, while Arato was a security supervisor at a contracting and trading company, the Philippine Embassy confirmed to Doha News.

Meanwhile, local media has named the Indian victims as colleagues Mobin Mohamed Khan, 33, and Sanjay Kumar Jaiswal, 35.

The men came from the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), The Peninsula reports. Jaiswal was from Raebareli district in central UP, while Khan’s home town is unconfirmed.

Representatives of the Indian embassy could not be reached on Sunday morning.

No one at state transport company Mowasalat, which is responsible for operating the Karwa buses, has responded to repeated calls from Doha News.

And, some 48 hours after the incident, Mowasalat has still not issued a statement.

What happened

Witnesses at the crowded bus station previously told Doha News that the bus had pulled in at one part of the terminal to drop off passengers, and had driven round to the stand marked for routes 56 and 156 to collect more commuters.

However, it appears that the driver lost control, crashed through concrete barriers, drove through a passenger island and came to a stop in the adjacent parking lot after t-boning a taxi cab.

Several of the waiting passengers were hit and knocked down in the incident. Four were killed and others reportedly injured.

It is not clear what caused the crash, though one witness said he observed the bus accelerating at the last moment.

The Peninsula reports the bus driver as being a Nepali national, who had been transferred to public transport after previously working as a school bus driver.

Safety fears

It has raised a number of concerns about the layout and safety of the bus station, which gets very crowded particularly on Thursday evenings and Fridays when many people have a day off.

Just hours after the accident, people could be seen thronging the paved lot despite requests from security officials to keep behind the barriers.

This is the second incident at the station in the last 16 months.

In August 2013, a vehicle drove into a crowd of people at the same station, injuring more than a dozen after the driver apparently lost control of his bus.

Concrete barriers have since been put in place at the bus station. However, they appear to have failed to stop the vehicle in the most recent incident.

Thoughts?