Iranian officials were on Thursday investigating how scores of railway wagons loaded with chemicals, fuel and fertiliser managed to roll out of control, derail and explode causing the deaths of 300 people and injuring 450 others.
”We currently have a death toll of 295. If we find more bodies, I don’t think it will be more than 10 or 15,” Vahid Barakchi, the head of Khorassan province’s disasters unit, said as investigators arrived at the scene of the carnage.
In the freak incident, the string of some 50 wagons ran away in the early hours of Wednesday and derailed at Khayyam station near Neyshabour, about 75km from the northeastern city of Mashhad.
The cargo of sulphur, fertiliser, petrol and cotton exploded in a massive blast as firefighters, watched by curious villagers also apparently unaware of the deadly cargo, were attempting to douse smaller fires.
The government declared Thursday a day of mourning in Khorassan province, as grieving relatives searched through lines of charred corpses so they could bury their dead.
News agency Irna said that President Mohammad Khatami had offered his condolences to the victims and ordered that the causes of the disaster be fully uncovered.
”I hope that with more attention and responsibility we will no longer witness such sad and unacceptable accidents,” he added.
Barakchi told reporters ”an investigation is under way”, and although the alert level had been lowered, the station remained sealed off by members of the elite Revolutionary Guards.
Mechanical diggers were seen moving in to the site to begin clearing the wreckage.
”There have been no further explosions,” Barakchi said, but added that offials were wearing face masks at the scene to avoid inhaling potentially toxic fumes.
The deadly mix of cargoes is likely to raise serious questions over rail transport safety, and officials said a team from the province and the capital, Tehran, was already probing the causes of the accident.
At the Behesht Fazl cemetery in Neyshabour, an AFP correspondent counted about 190 corpses and body parts lined up on the ground and covered in plastic, and at the Bahman hospital, AFP correspondents saw about 100 mutilated bodies.
”The magnitude of the explosion means that identifying the bodies will be a very slow process,” said Mehran Bakili, chief coroner in Neyshabour.
The huge blast occurred in a fertile and mainly agricultural area. It devastated nearby villages with a force measured by seismologists as that of a small earthquake and was heard as far away as Mashhad, one report said.
Surrounding villages suffered serious damage. With local hospitals unable to cope with large numbers of people suffering horrific burns, officials made an appeal for blood donors and brought in helicopters to evacuate the wounded.
Sabotage appears to have been ruled out, and Barakchi said ”vibrations” — possibly a light earth tremor — could have caused the wagons to have begun rolling out of a station further along the line where they had been parked.
The area had also been buffeted by high winds.
Hossein Zaresefat, the deputy governor general of Khorassan province in charge of security, said at least two local officials were among the dead.
They were the governor of Neyshabour city, Mojtaba Farahmand, and the local electricity chief, Morteza Fahrian. Irna said the head of the fire department had been killed, while its own correspondent from Neyshabour, 26-year-old Kazem Akbari, had also died.
Transport Minister Ahmad Khoram went to the scene in the area of the station, which gets its name from the nearby grave of Persia’s famed poet Omar Khayyam (1048-1122).
The accident occurred as the Islamic republic was gearing up for parliamentary elections on Friday, and while it was still recovering from the shock of the earthquake in the southeastern city of Bam in late December, where up to 45 000 people were killed. — Sapa-AFP