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.
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