United News of Bangladesh

At least 39 people were killed and 159 others injured after two high-speed trains collided in southern Spain late Sunday, with rescue operations continuing through the night, Spanish police said on Monday. The crash happened around 7:45 pm when the rear section of a train carrying about 300 passengers from Malaga to Madrid derailed and slammed into an oncoming train traveling from Madrid to Huelva, according to rail operator Adif. The collision occurred near the town of Adamuz in the province of Cordoba, about 370 kilometers south of Madrid. Authorities said five of the injured were in critical condition, while 24 others were seriously hurt. Transport Minister Óscar Puente said the death toll was not final and warned that the number could rise. Videos and photographs from the scene showed twisted train carriages lying on their sides under floodlights as emergency crews worked through the night. Passengers were seen climbing out of shattered windows, some using emergency hammers to escape. Salvador Jiménez, a journalist with Spanish broadcaster RTVE who was on one of the derailed trains, said passengers felt a violent jolt moments before the derailment. “There was a moment when it felt like an earthquake and the train had indeed derailed,” he told the network by phone. In Adamuz, a local sports centre was converted into a temporary hospital, while the Spanish Red Cross set up an assistance centre for victims and their families. Members of the civil guard and civil defence remained at the site overnight. Transport Minister Puente described the accident as “truly strange”, noting that it occurred on a flat stretch of track renovated in May and involved a train that was less than four years old. The derailed train belonged to private operator Iryo, while the second train was operated by state-run company Renfe. He said the rear of the first train jumped the tracks and crashed into the front of the second, knocking its first two carriages off the line and down a four-metre slope. An investigation into the cause of the crash could take up to a month, he added. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez expressed condolences to the victims’ families, calling it “a night of deep pain for our country.” Train services between Madrid and cities in Andalusia were cancelled on Monday. Spain has Europe’s largest high-speed rail network, with more than 3,100 kilometres of track. More than 25 million passengers travelled on Renfe’s high-speed trains in 2024.

Two people were killed after being run over by a speeding train in Gazipur's Tongi on Monday night. Their identities could not be known yet but it is suspected that they were father and son, police said quoting locals on Tuesday.   Mother with 8-month-old infant jumps in front of train in Gazipur; both dead According to Sub-Inspector Choton Sharma of Tongi Railway Police Outpost, the incident occurred around 10:30 pm near the Bonmala area on the Dhaka-Mymensingh rail route. A Kurigram Express train struck the victims, killing them on the spot. Efforts are on to identify them, he said. Three killed, seven Injured in separate road accidents in Faridpur Police recovered the bodies and sent them to the morgue for autopsy, he added.

A locomotive crashed into the tail of the Cairo-bound passenger train Sunday in southern Egypt, killing at least one person and injuring multiple others, authorities said. It is the second train crash in a month in the North African country.The collision occurred in the province of Minya, 270 kilometers (about 168 miles) south of Cairo, the railway authority said in a statement, and two railway carriages fell into an adjacent watercourse. The cause of the crash was being investigated, the statement added. Footage aired by local media showed the two carriages partially submerged in the watercourse. Apparent Israeli airstrike on mosque in central Gaza kills at least 18 people Along with the fatality, the Health Ministry said in a separate statement at least 21 people were taken to hospitals, of which 19 were later discharged after receiving treatment. Train derailments and crashes are common in Egypt, where an aging railway system has also been plagued by mismanagement. In September, two passenger trains collided in a Nile Delta city, killing at least three people. In recent years, the government announced initiatives to improve its railways. President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi said in 2018 some 250 billion Egyptian pounds, or $8.13 billion, would be needed to properly overhaul the neglected rail network.

India’s federal crime agency said Friday (July 07, 2023) it has arrested three railway officials in connection with one of the country’s deadliest train accidents, which killed more than 290 people last month. The arrested men have been charged with culpable homicide without murder and destruction of evidence, the Central Bureau of Investigation said in a statement. It identified them as two signal engineers and one technician, and said the investigation is ongoing. Error in signaling system led to train crash that killed 275 people in India, official says June’s train crash in eastern Odisha state occurred when a packed passenger train was mistakenly diverted onto an adjacent loop line where it rammed into a stationary freight train loaded with iron ore. The collision derailed the passenger train’s coaches onto another track where they struck a passing train that was running in the opposite direction. The two passenger trains were carrying more than 2,290 people when the collision took place. Nearly 1,000 people were injured. India’s deadly train crash renews questions over safety as government pushes railway upgrade After the accident, India’s Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the cause of the crash was related to the signaling system. India, a country of 1.42 billion people, has one of the world’s most extensive and complicated railways built during the British colonial era: more than 40,000 miles (64,000 kilometers) of tracks, 14,000 passenger trains and 8,000 stations. Spread across the country from the Himalayas in the north to the beaches in the south, it is also a system that is weakened by decades of mismanagement and neglect. Despite efforts to improve safety, several hundred accidents happen every year, and most such crashes are blamed on human error or outdated signaling equipment. Indian officials end rescue work for 2 wrecked passenger trains that killed over 300 people The June crash was India’s deadliest since 1995, when two trains collided near New Delhi, killing 358 people. In 2016, a passenger train slid off the tracks between the cities of Indore and Patna, killing 146 people.

Gura Pallay was watching another train pass by the one he was sitting in when he heard sudden, loud screeching. Before he could make sense of what was happening, he was thrown out of the train. Pallay, 24, landed next to the tracks along with metal wreckage of the train he’d been riding in, and instantly lost consciousness. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the twisted remains of three trains on the tracks. His train had derailed after colliding with a stopped freight train. Another passenger train, the one he had seen pass by moments earlier, had hit the derailed carriages. “I saw it with my own eyes, but I still can’t describe what I saw. I am haunted by it,” he said Sunday at a hospital, where he lay on a stretcher with a broken leg and dark wounds on his face and arms. Pallay is a laborer, like most of the people onboard the two passenger trains that crashed Friday in the eastern Odisha state, killing 275 people and injuring hundreds. He was traveling to Chennai city in southern India to take up a job in a paper mill factory when the Coromandel Express crashed with a goods freight train, knocking it off track, and was then hit by a second train coming from the opposite direction on a parallel track. Read: Error in signaling system led to train crash that killed 275 people in India, official says “I never imagined something like this could happen, but I guess it was our fate,” he said. Investigators said Sunday that a signaling failure might have caused the three-train crash, one of the worst rail disasters in the country’s history. Authorities recommended that India’s Central Bureau of Investigations, which probes major criminal cases, open an investigation into the crash. “We can’t bring back those we have lost, but the government is with the families in their grief. Whosoever is found guilty will be punished severely,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Saturday while visiting the site of the accident. The crash occurred as Modi’s government is focusing on the modernization of India’s British colonial-era railroad network. Several survivors of the crash said they were still struggling to comprehend the disaster. “Everything happened so quickly,” said Subhashish Patra, a student who was traveling with his family from Balasore to the state capital, Bhubaneswar, on the Coromandel Express. He was planning to take his mother to a hospital in Bhubaneswar to seek treatment for a hand injury, and then to travel to Puri, home to one of Odisha’s most important temples. Read: India’s deadly train crash renews questions over safety as government pushes railway upgrade The first thing Patra could make sense of after the crash was the sound of children crying. People were screaming for help in the dark, and around him lay corpses. “There were dead bodies all around me,” he said. Patra said the rail carriage he was in landed with the door facing upwards. He climbed onto a pile of wreckage inside the train and managed pull himself out. At the hospital on Sunday, Patra’s head was bandaged in gauze as he waited for an MRI scan. His head was throbbing with pain, he said, but he was grateful that he and his entire family had survived. Others weren’t so lucky. Alaudin, who goes by one name, travelled almost 200 kilometers (124.3 miles) Saturday from West Bengal state to the crash site, to look for his brother, who was onboard one of the trains. He learned about the crash from television. When he tried to call his brother’s mobile phone to check on him, no one answered. Worried, he and his sister-in-law rushed to the site of the crash afterwards and spent all of Saturday looking for him in various hospitals, hoping he would be alive. But his brother’s whereabouts remained unknown as the death toll continued to rise. Distraught, they finally made their way to the mortuary, where Alaudin’s brother body was wrapped in a black plastic bag and placed on top of blocks of melting ice. “I lost my brother, she lost her husband,” Alaudin said, pointing to his sister-in-law. “And his two boys have lost a father.” His brother was 36 years old, Alaudin said.  

The train derailment in eastern India that killed more than 300 people and injured hundreds more was caused by an error in the electronic signaling system that led a train to wrongly change tracks, India's railways minister said Sunday. ''Who has done it and what is the reason will come out of an investigation," Ashwini Vaishnaw said in an interview with New Delhi Television network. The explanation came as authorities worked to clear the mangled wreckage of the two passenger trains that derailed Friday night in Balasore district of eastern Odisha state, in one of the country's deadliest rail accidents in decades. Also Read: Indian officials end rescue work for 2 wrecked passenger trains that killed over 300 people Preliminary investigations revealed that a signal was given to the high-speed Coromandel Express to enter the main track line, but the signal was later taken off, and the train instead entered an adjacent loop line where it rammed into a goods train. The collision flipped Coromandel Express's coaches onto another track, causing the incoming Yesvantpur-Howrah Express from the opposite side to derail, triggering a three-train collision. The passenger trains were carrying 2,296 people total. Trains that carry goods are often parked on an adjacent loop line on the side so the main line is clear for a passing train. Also Read: India train accident: 2 Bangladeshis receiving treatment in hospital, says deputy high commissioner Fifteen bodies were recovered on Saturday evening and efforts continued overnight as heavy cranes were used to remove an engine that had settled on top of a rail car. No bodies were found in the engine and the work was completed on Sunday morning, said Sudhanshu Sarangi, director-general of fire and emergency services in Odisha. The accident occurred at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is focusing on the modernization of the British colonial-era railroad network in India, which has become the world's most populous country with 1.42 billion people. Despite government efforts to improve rail safety, several hundred accidents occur every year on India's railways, the largest train network under one management in the world. Chaotic scenes erupted on Friday night as rescuers climbed atop the wrecked trains to break open doors and windows using cutting torches to try to save people who were trapped inside the rail cars. Also Read: No more survivors found after India train crash kills over 280, injures 900; Modi heads to site Modi visited the crash site on Saturday to examine the relief effort and talk to rescue officials. He also visited a hospital where he asked doctors about the treatments being given to the injured, and spoke to some of the patients. Modi told reporters he felt the pain of those who suffered in the accident. He said the government would do its utmost to help them and strictly punish anyone found responsible. Ten to 12 coaches of one train derailed, and debris from some of the mangled coaches fell onto a nearby track. The debris was hit by another passenger train coming from the opposite direction, causing up to three coaches of the second train to also derail, said Amitabh Sharma, a Railroad Ministry spokesperson. In 1995, two trains collided near New Delhi, killing 358 people in one of the worst train accidents in India. In 2016, a passenger train slid off the tracks between the cities of Indore and Patna, killing 146 people. Most train accidents in India are blamed on human error or outdated signaling equipment. More than 12 million people ride 14,000 trains across India every day, traveling on 64,000 kilometers (40,000 miles) of track.  

A policeman was crushed under the wheels of a train in Gazipur's Tongi area on Tuesday morning. The deceased was identified as Abdul Baten, a constable of Tongi Railway police outpost. He was a resident of Shahjadpur thana in Sirajganj district. Choton Sharma, in-charge of Tongi Railway police outpost, said Baten slipped and fell under the wheels of the train while getting into Sirajganj Express train for goring to Dhaka for treatment on Tuesday morning. He was rushed to Shaheed Ahsan Ullah Master General Hospital where doctors declared him dead on arrival, Sharma added.  

Tens of thousands marched Wednesday in Athens and cities across Greece to protest the deaths of 57 people in the country's worst train disaster, which exposed significant rail safety deficiencies. Labor unions and student associations organized the demonstrations, while strikes halted ferries to the islands and public transportation services in Athens, where at least 30,000 people took part in the protest. More than 20,000 joined rallies in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, where clashes broke out when several dozen youths challenged a police cordon. Twelve students from the city’s university were among the dead in last week's head-on crash between two trains. Police fired tear gas in the southern city of Patras, where a municipal band earlier played music from a funeral march while leading the demonstration. In the central city of Larissa, near the scene of the train collision, students holding black balloons chanted “No to profits over our lives!” The accident occurred on Feb. 28 near the northern Greek town of Tempe. A passenger train slammed into a freight carrier coming in the opposite direction on the same line, and some of its derailed cars went up in flames. A stationmaster accused of placing the trains on the same track has been charged with negligent homicide and other offenses, and the country's transportation minister and senior railway officials resigned the day after the crash. But revelations of serious safety gaps on Greece’s busiest rail line have put the center-right government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on the defensive. He has pledged the government's full cooperation with a judicial inquiry into the crash. “This is more than a train collision and a tragic railway accident. You get the sense that the country has derailed,” Nasos Iliopoulos, a spokesperson for Greece's main left-wing opposition party, Syriza, said. Senior officials from a European Union railway agency were expected in Athens as part of promised assistance to help Greece improve railway safety. The agency in the past publicly highlighted delays in Greece's implementation of safety measures. Safety experts from Germany also were expected to travel to Greece to help advise the government, Greece's new Transport Minister George Gerapetritis said. “I, too, express my anguish and heartbreak over what happened in Tempe. This is an unprecedented national tragedy, which has scarred us all because of the magnitude of the tragedy: this unjustified loss of a great number of our fellow human beings,” Gerapetritis said. He acknowledged major omissions in safety procedures on the night of the crash. Strikes have halted all national rail services since the collision. Wednesday’s protests were also backed by striking civil servants’ associations and groups marking International Women’s Day. Subways ran for a few hours in Athens to allow people to get to the demonstration. The strikes also closed state-run primary schools and had public hospitals operating at reduced capacity. ___ Thanassis Stavrakis in Athens and Costas Kantouris in Thessaloniki, contributed.

A stationmaster accused of causing Greece's deadliest train disaster was charged with negligent homicide and jailed pending trial Sunday, while Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis apologized for any responsibility Greece's government may bear for the tragedy. An examining magistrate and a prosecutor agreed that multiple counts of homicide as well as charges of causing bodily harm and endangering transportation safety should be brought against the railway employee. At least 57 people, many of them in their teens and 20s, were killed when a northbound passenger train and a southbound freight train collided late Tuesday north of the city of Larissa, in central Greece. Also Read: Bangladeshi killed in Greek train crash The 59-year-old stationmaster allegedly directed the two trains traveling in opposite directions onto the same track. He spent 7 1/2 hours Sunday testifying about the events leading up to the crash before he was charged and ordered held. “My client testified truthfully, without fearing if doing so would incriminate him,” Stephanos Pantzartzidis, the stationmaster's lawyer, told reporters. “The decision (to jail him) was expected, given the importance of the case." Pantzartzidis implied that others besides his client share blame, saying that judges should investigate whether more than one stationmaster should have been working in Larissa at the time of the collision. "For 20 minutes, he was in charge of (train) safety in all central Greece,” the lawyer said of his client. Also Read: Death toll from Greece train crash rises to 57 Greek media have reported that the automated signaling system in the area of the crash was not functioning, making the stationmaster’s mistake possible. Stationmasters along that part of Greece’s main trunk line communicate with each other and with train drivers via two-way radios, and the switches are operated manually. The prime minister promised a swift investigation of the collision and said the new Greek transportation minister would release a safety improvement plan. Once a new parliament is in place, a commission also will be named to investigate decades of mismanagement of the country’s railway system, Mitsotakis said. In an initial statement Wednesday, Mitsotakis had said the crash resulted from a “tragic human error.” Opposition parties pounced on the remark, accusing the prime minister of trying to cover up the state's role and making the inexperienced stationmaster a scapegoat. “I owe everyone, and especially the victims’ relatives, a big apology, both personal and on behalf of all who governed the country for many years," Mitsotakis wrote Sunday on Facebook. "In 2023, it is inconceivable that two trains move in different directions on the same track and no one notices. We cannot, we do not want to, and we must not hide behind the human error.” Greece's railways long suffered from chronic mismanagement, including lavish spending on projects that were eventually abandoned or significantly delayed, Greek media have reported in several exposes. With state railway company Hellenic Railways billions of euros in debt, maintenance work was put off, according to news reports. A retired railway union leader, Panayotis Paraskevopoulos, told Greek newspaper Kathimerini that the signaling system in the area monitored by the Larissa stationmaster malfunctioned six years ago and was never repaired. Police and prosecutors have not identified the stationmaster, in line with Greek law. However, Hellenic Railways, also known as OSE, revealed the stationmaster's name Saturday, in an announcement suspending the company inspector who appointed him. The stationmaster also has been suspended. Greek media have reported that the stationmaster, a former porter with the railway company, was transferred to a Ministry of Education desk job in 2011, when Greece's creditors demanded reductions in the number of public employees. The 59-year-old was transferred back to the railway company in mid-2022 and started a 5-month course to train as a stationmaster. Upon completing the course, he was assigned to Larissa on Jan. 23, according to his own Facebook post. However, he spent the next month month rotating among other stations before returning to Larissa in late February, days before the Feb. 28 collision, Greek media reported. On Sunday, railway unions organized a protest rally in central Athens attended by about 12,000 people according to authorities. Five people were arrested and seven police officers were injured when a group of more than 200 masked, black-clad individuals started throwing pieces of marble, rocks, bottles and firebombs at officers, who gave chase along a central avenue in the city while using tear gas and stun grenades. In Thessaloniki, about 3,000 people attended two protest rallies. Several of the crash victims were students at the city’s Aristotle University, Greece’s largest, with over 50,000 students.. The larger protest, organized by left-wing activists, marched to a government building. No incidents were reported at that event. In the other, staged by Communist Party members at the White Tower, the city's signature monument, there was a brief scuffle with police when the protesters tried to place a banner on the monument. “The Communist Party organized a symbolic protest today in front of the White Tower to denounce the crime in Tempe, because it is a premeditated crime, a crime committed by the company and the bourgeois state that supports these companies,” Giannis Delis, a communist lawmaker, told The Associated Press.

A head-on collision between a passenger train and a freight train in Greece has killed dozens of people and injured scores more. Rail travel in Europe is a common and relatively affordable and convenient way for many Europeans to travel. It also has a good safety record overall, growing safer in past years. Yet the tragedy in Greece is a reminder of how deadly crashes can be when they happen. Here is a look at some of the most deadly train crashes in recent years. FUNICULAR FIRE In November 2000, a cable car on a funicular railway caught fire in a mountain tunnel in Kaprun, Austria, killing 155 people. Those who died were skiers and snowboarders heading to the slopes of the Kitzsteinhorn mountain. Read more: Rescuers comb wreckage of Greece’s deadliest train crash HIGH-SPEED TRAIN HITS BRIDGE In June 1998, a high-speed train traveling at 200 kph (125 mph) collided with a bridge at Eschede, Germany, causing it to collapse, a crash that killed 101 people and injured more than 100. It was Germany’s deadliest postwar rail disaster. SPANISH COMMUTER TRAIN In July 2013, a commuter train hurtled off the rails as it came around a bend near the northwestern Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela, killing 80 and injuring 145 others. An investigation showed the train was traveling 179 kph (111 mph) on a stretch with an 80 kph (50 mph) speed limit when it left the tracks and smashed into a wall. The case finally went to trial in October with the driver and a former railway security director accused of professional negligence. A verdict is expected in the coming months. SPANISH SUBWAY TRAIN A subway train traveling at excessive speed crashed in an underground tunnel in the eastern city of Valencia in July 2006, killing 43 people and injuring scores more. It took 13 years for a court to find four managers of the city’s subway system guilty of negligent manslaughter for not taking the necessary safety measures needed to prevent the tragedy. Read more: Fiery Greece train collision kills 32, injures at least 85 TRAIN PLUNGES INTO RAVINE In January 2006, a failure of the braking system in a train caused it to derail and plunge into a ravine outside the Montenegrin capital, Podgorica. The crash killed 45 people, including five children, and injured a further 184. It was the worst train disaster in Montenegro’s history. EXPLOSION AT STATION In 2009, a freight train carrying gas derailed at the Viareggio station, near the Tuscan city of Lucca, and exploded, killing 32 people. Poorly maintained axels of the train were blamed. HEAD-ON CRASH IN LONDON The worst rail crash in Britain in the past 30 years happened in October 1999, when a train heading out of London’s Paddington station went through a red light and crashed into an incoming high-speed train, killing 31 people. Around 400 people were injured. COMMUTER TRAINS CRASH In July 2016, two Italian commuter trains collided head-on in late morning between towns in the southern region of Puglia, killing 31 people and injuring scores more. An investigation found an error of communication between the stations that each train had departed from. RUSH HOUR CRASH NEAR BRUSSELS On Feb. 15, 2010, two commuter trains slammed into one another just outside Brussels during morning rush hour when one ran a red light. In all, 19 people were killed and 171 injured in the nation’s worst train crash. Compounding the tragedy was that a similar red-light crash had happened years before and that promises to add security measures weren’t fully implemented.