A crowded train sped through a railway station in central India, jumped the tracks and crashed into a signal cabin yesterday, killing at least 18 passengers and injuring 100, authorities said.
The death toll was likely to rise as many passengers remained trapped inside the carriages and 40 of the injured were in a critical condition, they said.
Six coaches of the Bundelkhand Express derailed near Datia town in Madhya Pradesh, about 400km north of the state capital, Bhopal, a police officer said.
"The engine and the first six carriages jumped the rails and overturned," Vagesh Pandey, a railways spokesman, said from the scene of the accident. "Casualty figures will increase as we find more bodies which are believed to be stuck between carriages or in their mangled seats."
Rescue teams, including soldiers were removing passengers from the cars.
The officer said the train had been due to stop at the station but sped through and jumped the tracks in an area where coaches are serviced and cleaned.
"We suspect the brakes of the train failed," he added.
It crashed into the signal cabin beside the tracks and the impact left coaches piled one on top of the other, railway officials said.
"We have people trapped in the bogies. They [rescue teams] are cutting into the bogies and we will see how many people are trapped inside," Datia district administrator Caroline Khongwar told NDTV news channel.
"The train's speed limit was supposed to be 15 [kilometers per hour] but as far as I have been able to find out, it was going at 90 at the station," Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav said in New Delhi.
The train was going from the town of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh to Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh.
India has one of the world's biggest railway networks, running almost 12,000 trains daily carrying more than 13 million people. It registers about 300 accidents a year. Experts say the system, saddled with huge losses because of low fares and a massive workforce, has little money to invest in improving safety and infrastructure.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS