INDIA: At least 50 people were killed and 150 others injured when two passenger trains collided head-on in northern India yesterday.
Officials expect the death toll to rise, as many of those injured were seriously hurt.
The army was called out to help rescue workers operating cranes at the crash scene near Mansar village in Punjab state, 450km north of New Delhi, to pull apart the mangled carriages.
A long line of bodies covered with white sheets lay stretched across the ground, while others were sent to nearby hospital morgues.
Late in the afternoon Indian Rail officials said the bodies of 15 men, 11 women and one child had been pulled from the twisted wreckage while teams of rescue workers used cutting equipment to slice through the debris to free trapped passengers.
"The cause of the accident is not known," Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav said before leaving Delhi for the scene.
Railway officials said there appeared to have been a mix-up that allowed the local train onto the single-track main line when the express train for Ahmedabad, coming from Jammu in the north, was racing down, carrying nearly 700 passengers.
"It's obvious that one of the two stations involved goofed up," said Mr Satish Mohan Vaish, the general manager of Northern Railway.
Eye-witnesses said the locomotives of both trains were badly mangled in the crash, which occurred just before midday local time, but the driver of one train was pulled out alive. His condition was not known.
"Passengers were shrieking as they were trapped inside coaches immediately after they smashed into one another," Mr Jodha Mal, the owner of a shop near the site, said.
He heard a massive screeching of wheels as the drivers tried desperately to halt before the deafening collision.
"I heard a loud crash, almost a big blast. I ran out of my house to see smoke all around. Men and women from our village rushed to the accident site with ladders to try and get out as many people as possible," said Ms Kamla Rani, whose house is close to the scene.