At least 200 people were killed and hundreds more were hurt on Monday when a runaway passenger train, hurtling backwards down the track, slammed into a freight train in central Tanzania, officials said.
Survivors described scenes of horror with passengers leaping from the speeding train in a desperate attempt to save their lives, and the driver running through packed carriages screaming that the train, with 1,000 people aboard, was out of control.
"The bodies were lying on the ground. It was a horrific scene," a journalist who had been to the crash site said. "I saw men lowering a woman's body from the wreckage using ropes."
A number of corpses were still trapped under the wreckage.
"I counted 100 bodies lying on the ground next to the wreckage," another local journalist, Daniel Musangya, told Reuters in the Tanzanian administrative capital, Dodoma.
"Other bodies are trapped beneath the overturned cabins. The badly injured so far are about 800."
Hospital officials said the death toll was at least 200.
The passenger train was climbing a hill when it suffered a mechanical failure and rolled backwards toward an approaching freight train, said Isaac Mwakajila, assistant director-general of Tanzanian Railway Corporation.
"The train went off the railway tracks backwards and smashed into another train behind it. It had 22 cabins, and 21 of them fell off the rail tracks," he said. The accident occurred at about 8:30 a.m.
"We are not sure of the exact number of those dead. It is very difficult to get figures from the scene," Mwakajila said.
Survivors said the driver lost control as the train rolled back down the hill for about 30 minutes before slamming into the freight train.
FAST AND BACKWARDS
Survivor John Maganga, 32, said the train, going from Dar es Salaam to the northwestern town of Kigoma, was moving fast.
"When the train rolled backwards, it gained momentum and was moving at a very high speed," he said, his head bleeding.
"The driver left the engine and ran into the cabins telling people to close the windows and shouting that the train was out of control."
"Other passengers jumped off the train to save their lives," he added.
Maganga and many other survivors were taken to hospitals at Dodoma, about 60 miles from the scene of the accident.
Rescue workers and relatives of passengers waited on the station platforms at Dodoma for the injured to arrive.
"It is a very bad situation, the hospitals are full to capacity and we have a shortage of doctors," said Anna Abdallah, the minister for health and a medical doctor, who was helping treat the injured in the wards at Dodoma regional hospital.
TWO DAYS OF MOURNING
John Mtimbwa, the regional medical officer in Dodoma, told Reuters: "At least 200 people are dead but we fear there could be more." The trains collided between Igandu and Msagali, southeast of Dodoma and about 250 miles west of Tanzania's main city and commercial capital Dar es Salaam.
At Mpwapwa district hospital in Dodoma, scores of relatives, some wailing, waited to identify friends or relatives among the injured.
A total of 229 people have been admitted to the Mpwapwa hospital, and 60 others at the Dodoma regional hospital.
Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa visited Dodoma hospital to comfort the injured. Tanzanian state radio said he was pained to see children crying in the wards looking for their parents.
Prime Minister Frederick Sumaye visited the crash scene and later announced two days of official mourning, when flags would fly at half mast.
(China Daily June 25, 2002)
