A crowded passenger train slammed into a stationary freight train in western India early yesterday, throwing cars off the tracks and killing at least 24 people, a top railway official said.
At least 94 people were injured, 20 of them seriously, in the collision in Samlaya, a village at Gujarat state.
It was not immediately clear what caused the accident, though one official said a signal failure might be to blame.
PHOTO: EPA
Soldiers used metal cutters to extract about 80 passengers trapped in a coach that had climbed over another, as anxious relatives awaited word about their loved ones.
"I was sleeping when I fell from the upper berth. There was a deafening crash. We tried getting out of the coach, but the door was jammed," said passenger Preeti Thakkar, 23, who was in a hospital with an injured collarbone from her fall.
The accident occurred when a passenger train coming from the Hindu pilgrimage city of Varanasi hit the freight train at the Samlaya station, about 36km west of the city of Vadodara. At least five of the cars derailed and fell on their sides.
Federal Railway Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav was heckled by a crowd of about 1,000 and stones were thrown at his car when he visited the main hospital in Vadodara where 72 of the injured were being treated. No one was injured in the confrontation.
Earlier, Yadav visited the crash site and spoke to railway officials but did not speak to the hundreds of passengers and their relatives still at Samlaya station.
"It took the railway minister more than eight hours to reach the site. And when he reached the hospital, the police would not let us talk to him," said Navin Shah, who was searching for his father, a passenger on the train.
Villagers from Samlaya and other nearby communities were the first to reach the train and began pulling people out of the fallen coaches.
Firefighters and soldiers used a hydraulic ladder to reach the top of a coach that had climbed over another and cut through the top with blowtorches to rescue people trapped inside.
Railway officials said that at least 432 passengers were aboard.
"We fear around 80 people are still trapped in one of the coaches," said Gujarat railway minister Narayan Singh Rathore, who was supervising the rescue operation.
Many of the passengers were sleeping when the accident occurred around 3:30am.
"It was terrible. People were screaming in the dark and everyone was pushing to get out of the train," said Thakkar, who was traveling with her parents.
After about two hours, Thakkar said, soldiers were able to cut through the door of the coach and pull out those trapped inside. Thakkar was taken to hospital by rescue workers and said she had no word about her parents.
"I don't know about my parents. I have not seen them since it happened," she said, weeping.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a