India halts trains after 108 die in derailment

Railway authorities cancelled all night trains in an eastern Indian state today after a passenger express train derailed and was hit by a cargo train, killing at least 108 people and injuring hundreds.

The government accused Maoist rebels of sabotaging the tracks.

Railway workers and paramilitary soldiers used cranes to lift and pry apart train carriages to pull out more bodies from the Jnaneswari Express, which was heading from Calcutta to suburban Mumbai when it derailed early Friday.

“The death toll has reached 108 with some more bodies being pulled out from the debris today,” said Surojit Kar Purkayastha, state inspector-general of police.

More than 140 people with injuries were in hospitals in towns near the accident site, officials said,

Railway officials said some bodies were still trapped between the engines of the two trains, which smashed together near the small town of Sardiha, about 90 miles west of Calcutta in West Bengal state.

Rescue workers had not yet cut open a badly smashed carriage where they expected to find still more bodies, Purkayastha said. The work of removing the debris and pulling out the bodies was hampered by swarms of flies and the stench of corpses quickly decomposing in the humid heat, officials said.

Railway authorities said they would not run any trains at night in West Bengal for at least the next four days, when Indian Maoist rebels have called a general strike.

The area is a stronghold of the rebels, known as Naxalites, who have launched repeated and often-audacious attacks in recent months – despite government claims of a crackdown.

Just 11 days ago, the rebels ambushed a bus in central India, killing 31 police officers and civilians. A few weeks before that, 76 soldiers were killed in a rebel ambush – the deadliest attack by the rebels against government forces in the 43-year insurgency. There have been dozens of smaller attack.

The government vowed once again to crush the Naxalites, who Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has often described as India’s biggest internal security challenge. But analysts say the government is hobbled by vacillating policies, poorly trained and ill-armed security forces and vast tracts of India where the government has little influence and where poverty has brought considerable support to the Naxalites, who claim to be fighting on behalf of the rural poor.

The rebels, who have tapped into the poor’s anger at being left out of the country’s economic gains, are now present in 20 of the country’s 28 states and have an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 fighters, according to the Home Ministry.

In Sardiha, officials said the train tracks had been sabotaged but disagreed about exactly what had happened, with some saying it was caused by an explosion and others blaming cut rail lines.

A railway safety commission will meet Monday to examine all the evidence from the crash site to determine the cause of the derailment, officials said.

The Maoists seldom claim credit for their attacks.