8-7-2023 (NEW DELHI) Indian police have arrested three men in connection with a triple-train collision that killed nearly 300 people in the eastern state of Odisha last month. The accident, which occurred when a passenger train was mistakenly diverted onto a loop line and collided with a stationary goods train loaded with iron ore, also involved a fast train passing in the opposite direction. The arrested men, who were charged with culpable homicide and destruction of evidence, were identified as two signal engineers and one technician employed with Indian Railways.
The collision left at least 850 others injured, with carriages overturned and rescue workers struggling to pull out survivors from the mangled wreckage. Relatives spent days identifying their loved ones from post-mortem pictures of those killed in the crash.
Although India’s railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the crash was the result of a signalling issue, he did not give further details at the time, citing a government probe into the disaster. Train services resumed 51 hours after the crash, which is ranked as India’s third-worst and the deadliest since 1995, when 300 people were killed after two express trains collided near Agra, home of the Taj Mahal.
With the world’s fourth-largest rail network, Indian Railways runs some 14,000 trains daily with 8,000 locomotives over a vast system of tracks around 64,000km long, carrying more than 21 million passengers each day. The network has been under enormous pressure in India, which has recently become the world’s most populous country. In recent years, India has invested heavily in upgrading its rail network, building modern railway stations, laying new tracks, and installing electronic signalling systems.
