More than 200 people were killed and hundreds injured in a deadly accident involving three trains colliding in India on the evening of June 2, a local official said.
Two passenger trains and a goods train collided in Balasore city of Odisha state, according to Odisha Chief Secretary Pradeep Jena.
The collision killed at least 207 people and injured 900. The death toll is expected to rise, Odisha Chief Secretary Pradeep Jena said.
Images from the scene showed rescuers trying to search for survivors in a damaged train car, survivors trying to escape, and overturned train cars scattered across the tracks.
More than 115 ambulances and several fire brigades have been rushed to the accident site, officials said. Three national disaster response teams are also at the scene, and six more teams are being deployed, India's National Disaster Response Force said.
Rescue operations are underway and “all possible assistance” has been provided to those affected, Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on Twitter.
More than 115 ambulances and several fire brigades were dispatched to the scene. Photo: DW/Press Trust of India
The collision occurred at around 7:20 p.m. in India (around 1:50 p.m. in Vietnam) when the Howrah Superfast Express, running from Bangalore to Howrah, West Bengal, derailed and hit the Coromandel Express, running from Kolkata to Chennai, railway officials said.
The Coromandel Express then crashed into a goods train. According to the Hindustan Times, another 600 to 700 people are still trapped in the carriages.
Despite government efforts to improve rail safety, accidents still occur every year on Indian Railways, the world's largest rail network. India has more than 14,000 trains across states carrying more than 12 million passengers every day.
The death toll in the accident on June 2 surpassed the tragic accident in 2016, when more than 140 people died in a derailment in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
There are still 600-700 people trapped in overturned train carriages after the series of accidents. Photo: India Today
In 2017, more than 40 people died after several carriages of a passenger train derailed in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
In 2018, a train plowed through a crowd gathered on the tracks for a festival in the northern Indian city of Amritsar, killing at least 59 people and injuring dozens more.
In 2021, around 16,431 people died in nearly 18,000 train accidents across India. The majority (67.7%) of the train accidents were reported as “Fall from Train/Collision with Person on Track,” according to a 2021 report by the National Crime Records Bureau of India.
The families of those killed in the accident will be given $12,136 (nearly VND285 million), and those injured will be given less than that amount , said India's Minister of Railways, Communications, Electronics and Information Technology.
Nguyen Tuyet (According to CNN, Reuters, DW)
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