Rescuers struggled Sunday to pull survivors from the wreckage of a train crash which killed 36 passengers in southern India, the latest in a series of disasters on the country’s creaking rail network.
Officials were investigating whether Maoist rebels had tampered with the track, after eight coaches and the engine of the Jagdalpur-Bhubaneswar express were derailed at around 11:00 pm (1730 GMT) on Saturday.
“The death toll has gone up to 36. It is a possibility that it may rise further,” Anil Kumar Saxena, national railway spokesman, told AFP.
Another railways official J.P. Mishra earlier said some 50 injured have been moved to nearby hospitals.
The accident happened near Kuneru railway station in the remote district of Vizianagaram in Andhra Pradesh state.
It came only two months after nearly 150 people were killed in a similar disaster, highlighting the malaise on a network which is one of the world’s largest.
Saxena said government officials and emergency workers worked through the night to try to find survivors.
The spokesman said investigators were considering possible sabotage of the tracks by Maoist rebels, who he said were active in the area.
“It is being looked into, it is one of the many angles we are looking into,” he told AFP.
“There is some suspicion (of sabotage) because two other trains had crossed over smoothly using the same tracks earlier in the night.”
Police in Odisha, where the train was headed, dismissed any involvement by Maoist rebels known as Naxals in the derailment.
“We totally reject any possibility of Maoist involvement in the derailment. Kuneru is not a Naxal-hit area,” an unidentified senior intelligence officer was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India.
Television footage showed a line of carriages lying on their sides as rescuers in neon orange safety vests and hard hats tried to hoist passengers through the windows while locals looked on.
Workers carried a half-naked passenger covered in dust on a stretcher out of a tilted carriage. Another TV image showed a man lying faced down, crushed under mangled heaps of wreckage.
Injured victims lay on hospital beds and stretchers, their limbs swathed in bandages.
Mishra told the NDTV news network there were some 600 people in the carriages that derailed.
He added that 10 buses have been arranged for passengers who escaped injury to travel to the Odisha state capital of Bhubaneswar.
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