The death toll from the explosion of runaway train wagons laden with fuel and fertilisers in northeastern Iran has reached 295, according to an official document.
A train carrying industrial chemicals burns after it exploded outside the Iranian town of Neyshapur.(AP Photo)
The document was prepared by local officials for the Interior Ministry.
The wagons of petrol, fertiliser and sulphur products careered down the line, derailed, caught fire and later exploded as firefighters and villagers crowded nearby.
State news agency IRNA said tremors in the quake-prone region set the unmanned column of 51 wagons moving, but other officials said the tremor could have been the jolt of the blast itself, leaving unclear why the wagons had rolled away.
State television showed flames licking from mangled, charred wagons, with thick black smoke billowing into the sky at the scene in the saffron-growing province of Khorasan bordering Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.
"Some 183 bodies have been recovered and others still may be buried under the rubble of a nearby village," Mr Hassan Hadiani, a spokesman from the governor's office said earlier.
He said 260 injured had been taken to hospital and all blazes had now been extinguished in the stricken area close to the city of Nishapur, hometown of mediaeval poet Omar Khayyam - whose name the stricken village, Khayyam, carries.
Windows were shattered for more than 10 km around and the earth could be felt shuddering up to 70 km away.
One official told IRNA the dead included villagers and some of the more than 200 firefighters who had been battling the blaze.
IRNA said the governor general of Nishapur was killed in the blast along with the head of the city's electricity board, the fire chief and a 26-year old IRNA journalist.
In the worst rail crash of the last quarter century, at least 575 people died in June 1989 when two passenger trains in Russia's Ural mountains were engulfed in an explosion from a leaking gas pipeline.