Safety experts investigating a British train crash have blamed faulty points for the accident and a newspaper reported on Sunday that vandals may have tampered with the railway track.
The experts blamed faulty points for the accident, which killed seven people and injured around 90 others, track operators Railtrack said on Saturday.
The train was travelling at 100 mph (160 kph) when the wheels of its rear carriage came off the track after being caught on the points at Potters Bar suburban station, north of London, on Friday.
The last carriage became detached and ploughed into the station's platforms and a waiting room.
"Initial evidence suggests that nuts that held two other supports in place were detached from the points, which resulted in the front stretcher bar bearing all the stress and finally breaking," Railtrack chief John Armitt told a news conference.
"Why the nuts, which were an integral part of the points, were detached is not known," he said. "The investigation will now concentrate on this."
Armitt said checks had been carried out on points around Britain since the crash but no other problems had been found.
The Observer newspaper said on Sunday that senior rail industry sources had said that the nuts on the points had been removed deliberately in a 'sophisticated' act of vandalism.
"There are previous incidents of sophisticated vandalism in this area. It is clearly a failure of the points, but there is no question that this is anything other than a one-off, something local," a source told the paper.
Witnesses to the crash reported hearing a deafening bang and seeing passengers flung out of windows as part of the four-carriage train hurtled into the station's platforms, partially demolishing a bridge.
FIVE CRITICALLY ILL
Britain's Prince Charles visited survivors of the smash, the fifth fatal accident on the country's rail network since 1996.
"I'd like to send my deepest sympathy to all those who've lost their loved ones," the prince told reporters after visiting three survivors in Chase Farm Hospital, in north London.
Five people were still critically ill on Saturday. The two victims in the most serious condition, a man and a woman both in their late teens, were taken to London's Royal Free Hospital where they were being treated for head injuries.
The derailment was less than five miles (eight km) from Hatfield, where a broken rail caused an express train to come off the tracks in October 2000, killing four people.
The accident led to months of delays on Britain's railways as tracks were checked and rails replaced. Armitt was unable to say whether the track at Potters Bar had been replaced.
Friday's accident was the latest in a series of tragedies to have hit Britain's railways since they were privatised by the Conservative government of Prime Minister John Major in 1996.
Seven were killed in a crash in the London suburb of Southall in 1997. In October 1999, 31 died in a collision at Paddington in west London and 10 died in February last year in an accident at Selby in Yorkshire, northern England.
An emergency help line set up by police for those trying to find details of relatives missing after the crash was jammed throughout Saturday.
Victims of Friday's crash included former head of BBC World Service, Austen Kark, 75, who joined in 1954 and served as managing director between 1985 and 1986.
Lin Chia Hsin, a Taiwanese former television reporter with the Chinese-language broadcaster TVBS, died in the arms of a rescuer at Potters Bar station. She had quit her job in television to live with her boyfriend in Britain.
The Taiwanese embassy was trying to trace the whereabouts of two former TVBS colleagues travelling with Lin.
(China Daily May 13, 2002)
