At least 38 people died on Tuesday when two trains collided in northern India, officials said, revising downwards a previous death toll of 50.
After visiting the crash site, Punjab’s Chief Minister Amarinder Singh told reporters that the number of dead was 34.
Speaking at the hospital in Mukheriyan, the nearest large town to the scene of the accident, Singh said figures of 50 dead and 150 injured that he had announced to the state assembly were ”unconfirmed”.
Later, hospital officials in Mukheriyan said another four people had died and 17 people were in a serious condition.
At least four carriages were badly damaged in the collision of the two passenger trains near the village of Mansar, 150km east of Amritsar in the northern state of Punjab.
At the scene, a long line of bodies covered with white sheets stretched across the ground. Others had already been sent to hospital morgues.
The bodies pulled from the twisted wreckage included 15 men, 11 women and one child.
”Many of the dead were badly mutilated,” said police Superintendent Hoshiarpur Sukdev Singh Bhatti.
Rescue workers used gas-powered cutters to reach passengers trapped inside in the trains.
”People were shrieking as they were trapped inside coaches,” said Jodha Mal (40), owner of a shop near the site, adding that he heard a huge screeching as the drivers tried desperately to halt before the loud collision.
Authorities appealed to villagers to donate blood.
The express train and the local train crashed deep in rural India, 150km east of the Sikh holy city of Amritsar.
”The cause of the accident is not known,” Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav said before leaving for the scene of the tragedy.
Railway officials said there appears to have been a mix-up that allowed the local train on to the single-track main line at the wrong time. Media reports said two station masters have been suspended.
”I heard a loud crash, almost a big blast. I ran out of my house to see smoke all around. Men and women from our village rushed to the accident site with ladders to try and get out as many people as possible,” said one woman, Kamla Rani.
The express had left Jammu in Kashmir on Tuesday morning, bound for the western city of Ahmedabad. Tearful relatives thronged railway stations seeking word on the fate of their loved ones.
Anxious relatives of passengers on the local train between Jalandhar and Pathankot converged at the crash site to look for family members.
Up to 700 people could have been on the express alone at the time of the accident, said Mulkha Raj Sharma, superintendent at Jammu station.
Soldiers were called out to help in the rescue efforts and cranes were at the crash scene near Mansar village to pull apart the trains.
Villagers were distributing food and blankets to the injured.
Witnesses said the locomotives of both trains had been badly mangled in the crash just before midday, but the driver of one train was pulled out alive. His condition was not known.
Media reports said a special train had left New Delhi for the accident site, carrying doctors and medical equipment.
India’s railway system, which stretches 108 700km across the nation of a billion-plus people, carries about 13-million people each day. It records about 300 accidents, small and large, every year, owing in part to its antiquated infrastructure.
In September 2002, 130 people died when the luxury Rajdhani Express plunged off a bridge and tumbled into a river in eastern India. In 1998, a collision between two trains claimed at least 200 lives in Punjab.
Officials say many accidents could be avoided by reducing human involvement, especially in switching of tracks and signalling. — AFP
