A speeding express rammed into the back of a stationary passenger train in eastern India on Monday, killing more than 60 people and leaving 165 injured, many seriously. The standing train was waiting to leave Sainthia station in Birbhum district, 260 kilometres (160 miles) north of the West Bengal state capital Kolkata, when the express train crashed into it in the early hours of Monday.
Bodies and injured travellers were pulled from the mangled mass of steel by emergency services and by onlookers who had massed at the site of the accident, the second train disaster in West Bengal in less than two months. Railways Minister Mamata Banerjee and railway board chairman Vivek Sahai refused to rule out sabotage, but West Bengal Civil Defence Minister Srikumar Mukherjee said there was no evidence of foul play.
"It's not an act of sabotage. The tragic accident took place because of negligence on the part of the railway administration," Mukherjee said at the crash site. Mukherjee said a total of 61 people had been killed and 165 injured, 89 of them seriously.
"The train was running at unexpectedly high speed," railway board chairman Sahai told reporters. He said "human error could be the cause of the accident" but added he was puzzled about why the driver had not applied the brakes "even though he was very experienced" and had ignored the signalling system. The force of the impact hurled one wagon onto an overhead passenger bridge.
Local hospitals found themselves overwhelmed by the number of victims. "There were injured passengers writhing in pain on the floor of the emergency room unattended," Samir Nandy, who had come to look for his brother-in-law, told AFP. In May, nearly 150 people were killed when a Mumbai-bound high-speed passenger express from Kolkata veered off the tracks into the path of an oncoming freight train.
Police officials said a section of the track had been deliberately removed and blamed Maoist rebels active in the state. At the moment of Monday's impact, passengers recounted experienxplosion," one passenger told Times Now news channel. "I was flung from the berth and then people started shouting."
Another survivor, Rajni Dhar, said she heard a loud bang and then blacked out. "When I regained consciousness, I screamed for help and was pulled out of the train compartment," she said. Most of the dead were in the rear "unreserved" carriages, the cheapest section which is usually tightly packed.
Banerjee announced compensation of 500,000 rupees (10,500 dollars) for the families of the dead and 100,000 rupees for the injured. Heavy lifting equipment was rushed to the scene as well as soldiers and paramilitary forces, who helped assist with the rescue.
The state-run railway system - still the main form of long-distance travel despite fierce competition from new private airlines - carries 18.5 million people daily. There are hundreds of accidents on the railways every year, although the past five years have witnessed a marked decline in serious crashes. In 2002, 100 people were killed and 150 hurt when a carriage plunged into a river in the north-eastern state of Bihar, while in 1995 more than 300 died in a collision near Ferozabad, close to the Taj Mahal city of Agra.
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