Bloody, burnt bodies strewn on rails

Bloodied and badly burnt bodies were strewn over the site of a head-on train crash in eastern India yesterday in which up to 500 people are feared to have died, officials said.

Rescue workers trying to cut into the mangled wreckage said hundreds of bodies were still believed trapped in several totally compressed carriages buried under a pile of crumpled steel.

"It is the kind of scene you only see in movies, you cannot imagine how bad it is," Mr Ashok Chakravarti, a junior government official, said after visiting the site.

In India's worst rail accident, two overcrowded passenger trains collided at a small, wayside station in eastern Bengal state early yesterday morning, apparently due to a signal failure. Officials said around 250 bodies had been recovered in rescue operations at Gaisal station, some 300 miles north of the state capital, Calcutta. "The two engines and the first three or four carriages of both trains that smashed into one another at terrific speed were horribly mangled together, and it's going to take some time to cut through and confirm the final death toll," a rail official said in Calcutta. Covered by white sheets, the bodies stretched for almost a mile as they were laid out beside the wreckage.

The injured, meanwhile, had been rushed to the nearby military hospitals in Kishanganj and Islampur and the railway and civilian hospitals at Siliguri and New Jalpaiguri, a little further away, close to the hill town of Darjeeling. Rescuers, hampered by torrential monsoon rains, were using acetylene torches to cut through the mangled carriage remains, looking for survivors and bodies.

"At least 10 carriages were completely burned out, and it seems that many of the passengers were burned alive as they slept when the collision took place ," a rail official said. Paramilitary Border Security Force personnel were part of the rescue operations.