A new railway line being built for the August Beijing Olympic Games was a factor in a train crash that left 71 people dead in east China, officials and state media said yesterday.
The pre-dawn Monday crash near Zibo was the most severe in China in over 10 years, also leaving over 400 people injured.
Authorities blamed the accident in Shandong Province on the excessive speed of a train from Beijing to Qingdao — site of the Olympic sailing competition — that derailed and slammed into an oncoming train.
Zhang Mingqi (張鳴起), vice-head of a Cabinet-level investigative team into the accident, said that orders had gone out to drivers to reduce speed on the section of the track where the accident occurred because of construction on the line.
At the site of the crash workers had dug a more than 20m-deep hole that is to serve as the foundations as they link up another railway line from the Shandong capital of Jinan, local officials said.
“This is part of the Jinan-Qingdao line which is being built for the Olympic Games,” Zibo city spokesman Li Chenggang said as he pointed out the construction project at the site of the crash.
“The line is expected to be completed before the Olympic Games and will make travel between Jinan and Qingdao much faster,” Li said.
On April 23, the Jinan Railway Bureau in Shandong printed an order to reduce train speeds on the section of the line under construction to 80kph, Zhang said.
The train was traveling 13kph when it derailed as it rounded a curve near the construction site.
Orders to reduce speed were not properly transmitted to train drivers, the Beijing News said.
But “after this order was issued, no one confirmed that it had been received by the concerned work units [drivers],” the paper said.
Workers on the project, many of whom had assisted in pulling out injured and dead passengers from the Monday wreck, refused to comment on whether their construction work contributed to the wreck.
But Wang Jun (王君), head of the State Administration of Work Safety, said that authorities were also investigating whether the construction work had destabilized the existing track.
“In this investigation we need to clearly grasp factors in several areas, the first is the foundation of the track, whether or not it is stable,” Xinhua news agency quoted Wang as saying.
Three top officials of the Jinan Railway Bureau have already been sacked in the aftermath of the accident.
The Chinese authorities have scrambled to deal with the fall-out from the wreck, with 19 hospitals in Zibo working overtime to deal with the injured.
“Since the accident, the work carried out by Zibo city has gone smoothly,” Liu Xinsheng, vice-secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in Zibo, told reporters on Tuesday.
“Now we face the very hard and difficult task of taking care of all those who have been injured,” Liu said.
The accident was the second rail tragedy in Shandong this year. In January, a high-speed train ploughed into a group of railway workers in the province, killing 18.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion