A passenger train derailed in Turkey early yesterday, killing at least nine people and injuring dozens of others, the prime minister's office said. Media reports put the toll higher.
It said two cars rolled over when the train from Istanbul to the southern city of Denizli derailed near the city of Kutahya.
The rescue operation was still under way. It was not immediately clear how many passengers were aboard at the time of the accident.
Around 300 passengers had boarded in Istanbul and more than 400 others boarded in Kutahya, authorities said.
NTV television, citing officials at the scene, said nine bodies had been recovered so far. CNN-Turk television put the injury toll at 50.
The injured were hospitalized in Kutahya and in the nearby central Anatolian city of Kutahya, reports said. Buses transported uninjured passengers to their destinations.
Railway authorities suspected that the train might have been derailed at a turn because of ice on the tracks, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.
It was the nation's fifth major rail accident in less than four years.
In the last major train accident in Turkey, a passenger train rammed into a truck carrying farm workers in southern Turkey in November 2005, killing nine people and injuring 30 others.
In August 2004, a passenger train ignored a stop signal and rammed into an oncoming train in northwestern Turkey, killing six people and injuring 85.
The previous month, a newly inaugurated high-speed train from Istanbul to Ankara derailed, killing 37 people.
Three days later, a passenger train slammed into a minibus at a western railroad crossing, killing 15 people and injuring four others.
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