Pax, you might want to take a gander at this Boeing report:Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents
http://www.boeing.com/resources/boei...df/statsum.pdf
One quite interesting takeaway is that for the ten year period from 2006 to 2015, the rate of fatal and hull loss accidents for scheduled passenger operations was roughly 3 times better (less) than the rate for "all other operations" (which would be primarily freight and charter ops).
So we can debate the reasons why, but it is clear that pure freight operations are more dangerous than scheduled passenger operations.