Tanzania rail crash toll 'may reach 200'

An out-of-control passenger train going backwards slammed into an oncoming cargo train in central Tanzania, and at least 100 people on the packed train were reported dead.

Another 800 were injured.

Tanzania’s minister of transportation and communication, Mark Mwandosya, told reporters at the scene yesterday that rescuers had pulled 103 bodies from the wreckage by nightfall.

John Mtimba, the regional medical officer in Dodoma, said there may be as many as 100 more deaths.

People trapped inside the mangled wreckage of the train cars cried for help as darkness fell, 10 hours after the morning crash, said Betty Mkwasa, a reporter with Independent Television.

Rescuers did not have the heavy equipment needed to cut through the twisted steel to free those trapped, she said.

As many as 1,000 people may have been on the train when it crashed, Sukulu Sudi, a spokeswoman for the Tanzania Railways Corporation, said. It was in Igandu, a village near Mpwapwa, 55 miles south-east of the political capital of Dodoma.

All but one of the passenger train’s coaches derailed and overturned.

‘‘The way the coaches are piled on top of each other, from far away you would think it is a multi-storey building,’’ Prime Minister Fredrick Sumaye told parliament in Dodoma after visiting the scene. He declared two days of mourning.

The train was travelling from Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital, to Mwanza and Kigoma in western Tanzania.

Tanzania’s decades-old trains are notoriously overcrowded on what is the main rail line through the country. The railway was built by the Chinese in the 1960s, but has been poorly maintained.