Rescue workers used blowtorches to cut through the mangled wreckage of a derailed passenger train in northern India yesterday, as the recovery of more bodies brought the death toll to 80.
Bodies wrapped in white shrouds lay in rows on the ground next to the train, while anxious relatives thronged to the site of Sunday’s accident to search for their missing family members.
The death toll was expected to climb as teams cut deeper into the twisted coaches, said Colonel Amarjit Dhillon, a senior army official in charge of rescue operations.
Photo: AFP
“Sniffer dogs have been sent in to detect any bodies trapped under sheets of metal because it is physically not possible for search parties to enter,” local official A.K. Pathak told Agence France-Presse (AFP) from the scene.
More than 350 passengers were injured when the Kalka Mail jumped the tracks near the town of Fatehpur in Uttar Pradesh.
“I was listening to music on the upper berth, when there was a loud bang followed by a thud. I was flung from my seat and hit my head against the side of the coach,” passenger Subajit Ghosh, 20, said at a hospital in Fatehpur, his head swathed in bandages.
The cause of the crash was not immediately known, but newspaper reports said the driver slammed on the train’s emergency brakes when he saw cattle squatting on the tracks in front of the speeding train.
H.C. Joshi, a senior railway official, said authorities were investigating the cause.
Volunteers and soldiers worked through the night to pull the injured from the train’s 12 shattered coaches. Officials said the train was carrying about 1,000 passengers, but the exact number was not known.
The main government-run hospital in Fatehpur was overrun by grieving relatives searching for their kin among the injured and the dead.
Some of the bodies were so badly disfigured from the impact of the derailment that authorities had only managed to identify four of the dead, state-run All India Radio said.
Two Swedes were among those killed, while a third was hospitalized, Pathak said.
The train was on its way to Kalka, in the foothills of the Himalayas, from Howrah, a station near Kolkata in eastern India.
Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometers to the northeast, police said a militant group was suspected of triggering a bomb that led to the derailment of another train on Sunday.
G. P. Singh, inspector-general of police, said the Adivasi Peoples’ Army was suspected of triggering the bomb in Assam.
More than 50 passengers were injured when the train derailed in Rangiya, 50km west of Assam’s capital of Gauhati. The condition of four of them was critical, police said.
“There was a loud explosion and it was total chaos soon after,” passenger Jiten Das told AFP by telephone. “The coach in which I was traveling skidded off the track and fell in marshy land with waist-deep water. Somehow we managed to get out. I cut my head and arms and have a wound in my chest.”
No rebel group has claimed responsibility for the attack so far.
Train services across northern India have been disrupted as railroad authorities work to clear the tracks. At least 62 trains had been diverted to other routes and many others have been canceled, said S. Mathur, a railway official.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is acting railways minister, expressed “deep sorrow and shock at the loss of lives.”
“There is a real danger that the frequency of train accidents in India might soon desensitize people as ‘yet another’ instance of what has become thoughtlessly, mind-numbingly commonplace,” the Indian Express said in an editorial yesterday.
The newspaper criticized a political tradition of successive coalition governments awarding the railway ministry portfolio as a sop to important allies.
“This practice should be ended immediately and the ministry given to a responsible individual,” it said.
Additional reporting by AFP and Reuters
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