By Jay Shankar and Subramaniam Sharma May 28 (Bloomberg) — A goods train rammed into derailed coaches of a passenger express in eastern India, killing at least 35 people in the country’s worst rail disaster in four years, as officials suspected Maoist rebels had sabotaged tracks. The Gyaneshwari Express headed for the financial capital of Mumbai was struck by a cargo train in West Bengal ’s Jhargram district, 155 kilometers (96 miles) southwest of Kolkata, at 1:30 a.m. local time, the state’s Home Secretary Samar Ghosh said in a phone interview. Over 100 injured passengers have been taken to local hospitals, Praveen Kumar, a local deputy inspector general of police, said. “It is a case of sabotage,” Vivek Sahai, a member of the Railway Board, told reporters in New Delhi. The impact of the goods train caused most of the fatalities, he said. Police at the scene of the accident blamed Maoist guerrillas for the derailment, Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee told reporters. The leftwing rebels operate in 11 of India’s 28 states and have killed more than 7,500 people since 1998. They have stepped up attacks in recent weeks, blowing up a passenger bus in mineral-rich Chhattisgarh state earlier this month, killing 31 police personnel and civilians. Initially inspired by Maoist ideology, the guerrillas have pressed a campaign of violence against the government, police and landowners in a class war that seeks to install communist rule. Tracks ‘Cut’ Federal Home Secretary G.K. Pillai said in a phone interview it was too early to say what caused the accident. “We don’t want to blame the Maoists till we have definite evidence,” he said. “There is a cut on the railway track and several compartments were derailed. At least four to five of them are badly damaged,” Ghosh said, adding many passengers are still trapped inside the compartments. The crash is the worst in India since 2006, according to the India Today magazine, when about 40 people died in West Bengal. Press Trust of India said that as many as 65 people may have been killed today, reports that could not be immediately confirmed. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh , who has described the Maoists as the single biggest challenge to the country’s internal security, said he was grieved to learn about the crash, according to an emailed statement from his office. Asia’s Oldest Network India’s 63,000-kilometer railway network, Asia’s oldest, is frequently hit by fatal accidents. At least 10 people were killed after passenger trains collided in north India in dense fog in January. More than 20 people died in a similar accident in October. The rail network carries about 15 million people each day on 11,000 passenger trains, and 1.4 million tons of freight. “The death toll may rise. Most of the injured have been evacuated by road or helicopter” to nearby Kharagpur town, Pillai said of today’s crash. Television channel CNN-IBN showed police officers carrying the injured from the wreckage of the passenger train. India banned the Maoists or Naxalites and more than a dozen “front organizations” in June last year. The radical movement takes its name from a 1967 peasant uprising in a village called Naxalbari in West Bengal. Banerjee announced compensation of 500,000 rupees ($10,900) for the families of those killed in today’s collision, and 100,000 rupees for the injured. To contact the reporter on this story: Ruth David in Mumbai at rdavid9@bloomberg.net
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Sabotage Suspected After Indian Train Collision Kills at Least 35 People
