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.
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
Japan is to downgrade its description of ties with China from “one of its most important” in an annual diplomatic report, according to a draft reviewed by Reuters, as relations with Beijing worsen. This year’s Diplomatic Bluebook, which Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government is expected to approve next month, would instead describe China as an important neighbor and the relationship as “strategic” and “mutually beneficial.” The draft cites a series of confrontations with Beijing over the past year, including export controls on rare earths, radar lock-ons targeting Japanese military aircraft and increased pressure around Taiwan. The shift in tone underscores a deterioration
LAW CONSTRAINTS: The US has been pressing allies to send warships to open the Strait, but Tokyo’s military actions are limited under its postwar pacifist constitution Japan could consider deploying its military for minesweeping in the Strait of Hormuz if a ceasefire is reached in the war on Iran, Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Toshimitsu Motegi said yesterday. “If there were to be a complete ceasefire, hypothetically speaking, then things like minesweeping could come up,” Motegi said. “This is purely hypothetical, but if a ceasefire were established and naval mines were creating an obstacle, then I think that would be something to consider.” Japan’s military actions are limited under its postwar pacifist constitution, but 2015 security legislation allows Tokyo to use its Self-Defense Forces overseas if an attack,
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) yesterday faced a regional election battle in Rhineland-Palatinate, now held by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Merz’s CDU has enjoyed a narrow poll lead over the SPD — their coalition partners at the national level — who have ruled the mid-sized state for 35 years. Polling third is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which spells a greater threat to the two centrist parties in several state elections in September in the country’s ex-communist east. The picturesque state of Rhineland-Palatinate, bordering France, Belgium and Luxembourg and with a population of about 4 million,
RSS