An apparent bomb attack on an upscale passenger train speeding through a forest between Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia killed up to 39 people and injured nearly 100, officials said yesterday.
Mangled and overturned carriages were strewn across the tracks and down the railway embankment as scores of orange-vested rescue workers searched urgently for further victims that could be trapped under the wreckage.
The incident occurred late on Friday night and targeted the same train hit by a bomb attack in August 2007 that injured dozens of passengers. Officials said they believed the latest incident was also caused by a bomb.
PHOTO: AFP
“Operational-investigative teams are treating as their main theory the detonation of an unidentified device by unidentified persons,” said Vladimir Yakunin, head of the state firm Russian Railways. “To put it simply, a terrorist attack.”
Witnesses, including passengers on the train and inhabitants living near the site, said they heard a loud bang just before the train went off the rails and police told reporters at the site there was a large crater under the track.
An unnamed security official quoted by the Interfax news agency said the crater was about 1m in diameter.
A blast along the track in the 2007 attack ripped out a long segment of rail, causing the train to careen off the tracks.
The crater could have been caused by an “explosion from a device placed underneath one of the wagons,” the RIA-Novosti news agency quoted another security official as saying.
There were conflicting reports on the death toll, but Alexander Basulin, an official at the emergency situations ministry, was quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency as saying “in all, there are 39” dead.
The subsidiary of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) in Kumamoto, Japan, turned a profit in the first quarter of this year, marking the first time the first fab of the unit has become profitable since mass production started at the end of 2024. According to the contract chipmaker’s financial statement released on Friday, Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Inc (JASM), a joint venture running the fab in Kumamoto, posted NT$951 million (US$30.19 million) in profit in the January-to-March period, compared with a loss of NT$1.39 billion in the previous quarter, and a loss of NT$3.25 billion in the first quarter of
DRONE CENTRAL: Taiwan aims to become Asia’s democratic hub for drones, with most exports focused on high-quality military-grade models, an official said Taiwan’s drone industry is expected to expand significantly by 2030, producing 100,000 units per month and exporting half of them, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Current drone production capacity is about 15,000 units per month, but the industry can quickly scale up as demand increases, Industrial Development Administration Director-General Chiou Chyou-huey (邱求慧) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s drone output grew 2.5-fold last year to NT$12.9 billion (US$408.3 million) under a government program to develop the uncrewed vehicle sector, he said. The Executive Yuan in October last year approved plans to invest NT$44.2 billion into domestic production of uncrewed aerial
RESOLUTE BACKING: Two Republican senators are planning to introduce legislation that would impose immediate sanctions on China if it attempts to invade Taiwan US House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday reaffirmed US congressional support for Taiwan, saying the US and “all freedom-loving people” have a stake in preventing China from seizing Taiwan by force. Johnson made the remarks in an interview with Fox News Sunday on US President Donald Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) last week. In an interview that aired on Friday on Fox News, just as Trump wrapped up a high-stakes visit to China, he said he has yet to green-light a new US$14 billion arms package to Taiwan and that it “depends on China.” “It’s a very good
US President Donald Trump yesterday said he would speak to President William Lai (賴清德) as his administration considers whether to move ahead with a US$14 billion weapons sale to Taiwan — a potential arms deal that has drawn criticism from China. “Well, I’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody,” Trump told reporters yesterday when asked if he had any plans to call his counterpart, although he did not offer a time frame for when such a conversation could take place. Trump previously said he would speak to the person “that’s running Taiwan,” without specifying who he meant. “We have that situation very
RSS