Maoist rebels blamed as 71 killed in Indian train crash

SUSPECTED Maoist rebels derailed an overnight passenger train in eastern India yesterday, triggering a crash with an oncoming goods train that killed at least 71 people and injured about 200 more, officials said.

Survivors described a night of screaming and chaos after the derailment and said that it took rescuers more than three hours to reach the scene.

The passenger train and the goods train were knotted together in mangled metal along a rural stretch of track near the small town of Sardiha, about 90 miles west of Kolkata in West Bengal state.

Officials disagreed on the cause of the derailment, with some saying it was caused by an explosion but others blaming sabotaged rail lines.

Home minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said in a statement that a section of the railway tracks had been cut, but "whether explosives were used is not yet clear".

Bhupinder Singh, the senior police official in West Bengal, said posters from the People's Committee Against Police Atrocities – a group local officials believe is closely tied to the Maoists – had been found at the scene taking responsibility for the attack.

However, a spokesman for the group, Asit Mahato, denied any role.

The area is an isolated stronghold of India's Maoist rebels, known as Naxalites, who have stepped up attacks in recent months and had called for a four-day general strike starting yesterday. Earlier this month, the rebels ambushed a bus in central India, killing 31 police officers and civilians.

Nearly ten hours after yesterday's incident railway police and paramilitary soldiers were using blowtorches and cables to try to reach at least 12 passengers still trapped in the wreckage, said AP Mishra, general manager of the railway system in that area.

The passenger train was travelling from Kolkata to the Mumbai suburb of Kurla when 13 carriages derailed. A goods train then crashed into three of the carriages from the other direction, railways minister Mamata Banerjee said.

Mr Mishra said the train had been derailed by a bomb and that the tracks had also been sabotaged. Mr Banerjee said that authorities suspected the bomb was planted by Maoist rebels.

Soumitra Majumdar, a railway spokesman, said it was likely that the death toll would rise as search and rescue operations continued.

Helicopters were eventually brought in to help evacuate the injured to hospitals, officials said.

The rebels, who have tapped into the rural poor's growing 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.

Mr Banerjee said the Saridha area had been the scene of earlier Naxalite attacks, and that trains were under orders to travel slowly through the region – in part so the drivers can keep watch for sabotaged tracks or bombs, and in part so the effects of a crash are lessened if a train does derail.