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India’s railways minister has said the fatal train crash in India was probably caused by a signal fault that wrongly diverted a train.
There was a bug in the “electronic entanglement” – a system that manages pathways and sequences of signals using sensors and feedback, Ashwini Vaishnow said.
“Whoever did it and how it happened will be discovered after a proper investigation,” he added.
At least 275 people died in the accident and nearly 1,200 others were injured.
The death toll was higher but was revised after officials found twice as many bodies.
Authorities completed rescue operations on Sunday and worked to clear the wreckage of two passenger trains that derailed on Friday night in Balasore district of Odisha state.
More than 1,000 people took part in the rescue operations in eastern India.
Jaya Verma Sinha, a senior railway official, said initial investigation found a signal for the high-speed Coromandel Express to run on the main track but the signal was later changed.
Instead, the train entered an adjacent loop line—a side track used for parking—where it collided with a freight train loaded with iron ore.
0:37 Drone footage shows a train crash
She said the collision turned the Coromandel coaches into another lane, causing the Yesvantpur-Howrah Express coming from the other side to derail.
Ms. Verma Sinha added that the passenger trains, which are carrying 2,296 passengers, are not going very fast.
“The system is 99.9% error-free. But a 0.1% probability of error is always there,” she said.
When asked if the accident could have been a case of vandalism, she said, “Nothing is ruled out.”
Vaishnau said on Saturday that families of those killed will receive 1 million rupees (£9,750) in compensation, while those seriously injured will receive 200,000 rupees (£1,950), with 50,000 rupees (£487) for minor injuries.
0:30 “We ran away but we saw a lot of dead bodies”
India’s Prime Minister Modi has attempted to modernize the railway network dating back to the British colonial era in India – the world’s most populous country with a population of 1.42 billion.
He promised the “harshest punishment” to those responsible as he visited the crash site and spoke to survivors at the hospital.
Read more: A hospital is like a war zone – eyewitness How safe is India’s railway network?
Image: The accident is the deadliest in India in more than 20 years
Despite efforts to improve safety, several hundred accidents occur each year. Most of it is blamed on human error or outdated transmission equipment.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron offered their condolences.
The Balasore crash is one of the most serious railway disasters in the country in decades.
In 1995, two trains collided near New Delhi, killing 358 people. In 2016, a passenger train derailed between the cities of Indore and Patna, killing 146 people.
About 22 million people on 14,000 trains travel across India each day.
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