Over 50 killed, scores injured in train crash, blasts in India
Pakistan Times Foreign Desk

MUKHERIYAN (India): At least 50 people died Tuesday when two trains collided in northern India, officials said, revising downwards a previous death toll of 50. However, after visiting the crash site, Punjab's Chief Minister Amarinder Singh told reporters that the number of dead was 40.

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 serious condition. At least four carriages were badly damaged in the collision of the two passenger trains near the village of Mansar 150 kilometers (90 miles) east of Amritsar in the northern state of Punjab.

Recap

As reported by 'Pakistan Times' in its edition of Tuesday, December-14, two trains collided head-on in the Indian northern state of Punjab, leaving at least 30 dead with 250 others injured.

Indian Railways Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav told parliament the Jammu Tawi-Ahmedabad Express and a local train had collided near Hoshiarpur. Senior railway officials have rushed to the site of the accident.

The Casualties

"The information we have is that 25 to 30 people are dead and more than 250 injured," a news agency quotes a spokesman at the Punjab police chief's office as saying.

"We are removing bodies from the coaches. The toll may go up," he said. Five compartments of the train are badly smashed and the authorities fear the death toll could rise.

It is still not clear what caused the crash. "We are focusing on ... rescue at this moment," Devender Sandhu, a railway spokesman, told a television network. Fog could have played a role in the accident, he said.

The accident occurred between the cities of Pathankot and Jalandhar, in India's north, about 180 miles northwest of New Delhi.

India has Asia's largest railway network under one management with around 11,000 trains carrying 13 million people daily. Much of the network still depends on outdated signalling equipment that is manually operated.

One killed, 60 injured in series of blasts in India

Meanwhile another report from Guwahati says that at least one person was killed and nearly 60 were injured Tuesday in a series of explosions triggered by militants in India's north-eastern state of Assam, police said.

No group claimed responsibility but police blamed the outlawed United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) rebel group for the attacks, the latest in a series to rock the troubled region in the past few months.

Details

In one of Tuesday's blasts, a bomb exploded in Assam's Nagaon district, 130 kilometres (80 miles) from the state capital Guwahati, killing at least one person and injuring 17, police said. "The Nagaon blast took place in a busy street adjacent to a local police station," said a police spokesman. "One person died on the spot."

Within hours of the Nagaon blast, another explosion flattened a fish market in Morigaon district, 80 kilometres east of Guwahati. "At least 27 people were injured when the bomb exploded. There were scores of shoppers in the market when the bomb ripped up stalls in the daily market," a senior police official said.

Grenade detonated

In Guwahati activists detonated a grenade in front of a local cinema. "Five people including a paramilitary soldier were injured in the grenade explosion," a police spokesman said.

"An improvised explosive device also exploded in the Guwahati railway station as soldiers were preparing to board a train. None of them were injured but the explosion damaged one of the boundary walls of the station," he said.

The Targets

The activists also fired a grenade at the home of Assam Excise Minister Rameshwar Dhanwar in the oil town of Digboi but he and his family were not home. There were two more blasts in Assam's Tinsukia district which left 11 people injured, police said.

"A blast in the Congress party office in Tinsukia left six workers injured while five people were wounded in an attack on a police station in Tinsukia," said the spokesman.

The attacks followed the deaths of two policemen and the wounding of several other people Monday in two powerful blasts in Guwahati. The ULFA has been fighting for an independent Assamese homeland since 1979. More than 10,000 people have died in the insurgency in Assam during the past two decades.●