AFP - 38 minutes ago
BEIJING (AFP) - - Sixty-six people were killed and nearly 250
injured early Monday when a passenger train from Beijing careered
off the rails and slammed into another train in eastern China,
state media reported.
The train was travelling to Qingdao -- the coastal city that
will host the Olympic sailing competition in August -- when it
derailed, causing the other train to leave the tracks too.
The accident, the worst in China in more than a decade, happened
in the city of Zibo in Shandong province, state-run Xinhua news
agency said.
State-run TV reported 66 killed in the accident. Xinhua said 57
had died immediately in the pre-dawn accident, while three others
died in hospitals later.
Out of 247 injured, four were French nationals, Xinhua said,
without identifying the four.
Witnesses said many passengers were able to climb out of the
wrecked train carriages shortly afterwards, some wrapped up in bed
sheets from the sleeper cars to guard against the early morning
chill.
"I think dozens were injured or killed," a doctor told Xinhua
earlier.
"We have received around 40 injured passengers but nobody died,"
a nurse at one of Zibo's hospitals told AFP.
"Some of them are seriously injured, some slightly injured.
Their injuries are external."
Nurses at the accident and emergency departments of two other
hospitals in the area said they were also counting the injured but
that no one had died, and there were no critical injuries.
The accident happened at 4:43 am (2043 GMT Sunday), Xinhua said,
quoting a spokesman from the Shandong provincial government.
The other train was on its way to Xuzhou in the eastern Jiangsu
province, from Shandong's Yantai.
About 10 carriages crashed into a ditch after the train
derailed, a witness told Xinhua.
A photo of the crash, posted on a popular Internet news web
portal, showed people wrapped in white blankets sitting by the
train wreckage.
Railway Minister Liu Zhijun has arrived at the scene of to
oversee rescue efforts, Xinhua said, where he demanded an
investigation to prevent this type of incident happening again.
The accident has disrupted traffic on a major rail route linking
Jinan, the capital of Shandong, to Qingdao.
In January, a high-speed train ploughed into a group of railway
workers in Shandong province, killing 18 people.
The Chinese government said earlier this year that 101,480
people died in 2007 in more than 500,000 transport, industrial and
other accidents.
It said the number of rail accident deaths fell 45 percent, or
2,595, but did not provide an absolute figure. However, data
suggest the number of train deaths last year was about 3,170.
In one of the worst rail accidents in recent times, 126 people
were killed and more than 200 injured when two trains collided in
central China's Hunan province in 1997.