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.
IDENTITY: A sex extortion scandal involving Thai monks has deeply shaken public trust in the clergy, with 11 monks implicated in financial misconduct Reverence for the saffron-robed Buddhist monkhood is deeply woven into Thai society, but a sex extortion scandal has besmirched the clergy and left the devout questioning their faith. Thai police this week arrested a woman accused of bedding at least 11 monks in breach of their vows of celibacy, before blackmailing them with thousands of secretly taken photos of their trysts. The monks are said to have paid nearly US$12 million, funneled out of their monasteries, funded by donations from laypeople hoping to increase their merit and prospects for reincarnation. The scandal provoked outrage over hypocrisy in the monkhood, concern that their status
The United States Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday it plans to adopt rules to bar companies from connecting undersea submarine communication cables to the US that include Chinese technology or equipment. “We have seen submarine cable infrastructure threatened in recent years by foreign adversaries, like China,” FCC Chair Brendan Carr said in a statement. “We are therefore taking action here to guard our submarine cables against foreign adversary ownership, and access as well as cyber and physical threats.” The United States has for years expressed concerns about China’s role in handling network traffic and the potential for espionage. The U.S. has
A disillusioned Japanese electorate feeling the economic pinch goes to the polls today, as a right-wing party promoting a “Japanese first” agenda gains popularity, with fears over foreigners becoming a major election issue. Birthed on YouTube during the COVID-19 pandemic, spreading conspiracy theories about vaccinations and a cabal of global elites, the Sanseito Party has widened its appeal ahead of today’s upper house vote — railing against immigration and dragging rhetoric that was once confined to Japan’s political fringes into the mainstream. Polls show the party might only secure 10 to 15 of the 125 seats up for grabs, but it is
The US Department of Education on Tuesday said it opened a foreign funding investigation into the University of Michigan (UM) while alleging it found “inaccurate and incomplete disclosures” in a review of the university’s foreign reports, after two Chinese scientists linked to the school were separately charged with smuggling biological materials into the US. As part of the investigation, the department asked the university to share, within 30 days, tax records related to foreign funding, a list of foreign gifts, grants and contracts with any foreign source, and other documents, the department said in a statement and in a letter to
RSS