International News

PUKHRAYAN, India, (MILLAT+APP/AFP): The death toll from India’s
rail disaster rose to 142 on Monday after workers toiled through the night removing victims from the wreckage, with grim warnings that more bodies were
trapped inside.
There was little hope of finding survivors among the mangled remains
of 14 carriages, which came off the tracks in northern India on Sunday in a rural district of Uttar Pradesh state.
“The actual toll will still be higher and it would be a difficult
task to identify all the persons, particularly those whose bodies are very badly damaged,” a senior local government official told AFP.
“We do not have an exact figure for the injured as of now. Rescue
work is still going on,” district police chief Zaki Ahmad told AFP as workers cleared the most severely damaged carriages.
More than 2,000 people are believed to have been on the train, though
many were travelling without reserved seats — or without tickets at all — making a precise estimate impossible.
“It is difficult to say how many people were exactly travelling but
it was definitely over 2,000,” said a spokesman for regional railway network.
A large crowd gathered at the rescue site on Monday, with many
combing through the bags and clothes strewn across the area in the hope of finding clues to the fate of their loved ones.
The disaster occurred at the peak of India’s marriage season, and at
least one wedding party was on board the train.
Local media said wedding clothes, jewellery and invitation cards
could be seen spilling from abandoned bags.
Hundreds of injured were being treated in nearby hospitals, including
many young children who had become separated from relatives.
Police were reportedly showing the children pictures of the dead in
an effort to identify their parents.
A fracture in the track is thought to have caused the Indore-Patna
Express to derail, sending the carriages cashing into each other and leaving some twisted beyond recognition.
India’s railway network, one of the world’s largest, is still the
main form of long-distance travel in the vast country, but it is poorly funded and deadly accidents occur relatively frequently.
A 2012 government report said almost 15,000 people were killed every
year on India’s railways, describing the loss of life as an annual “massacre”.
The latest accident — one of India’s deadliest — comes at a time
when the government has signed numerous deals with private companies to upgrade the country’s ageing rail network.
Last year, Japan agreed to provide $12 billion in soft loans to build
India’s first bullet train, though plans remain in their infancy.