At least 20 people were killed yesterday when a passenger train hit boulders on a bridge and jumped the tracks in western India, the railway minister said. At least 50 passengers were hospitalized with injuries.
The locomotive of the Bombay-bound Matsyagandha Express derailed and fell off the bridge and two of the train's eight coaches were hanging precariously in the Raigad district of Maharashtra state, spokeswoman Vaishali Patange said.
At least 20 people were killed, Railway Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav said.
Earlier, Patange said 12 bodies had been recovered from the two hanging coaches.
The rail track slices through hills on both sides. Boulders had streamed onto the tracks from a nearby cliff following heavy monsoon rains, the railway minister said.
The accident took place nearly 200km south of Mumbai, the capital of western Maharashtra state and India's commercial hub.
A similar derailment in the region in June last year killed 51 passengers -- the first accident since the 760km rail line was built to link Bombay with tourist destinations of Goa and Mangalore in 1998.
The route is considered one of India's most scenic railroad journeys. It cuts through hills and rivers along the western coast and has 91 tunnels between Mumbai and Mangalore.
Ajit Gawli, medical superintendent of a government-run hospital in Mahad, a town 20km west of the accident site, said 20 people had died and at least 50 others were hospitalized with injuries. Three of the injured were in serious condition with fractures and chest injuries. He said six of those killed were young children.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS