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In a head-on collision in northeast France Wednesday a passenger train from Luxembourg ploughed into a goods train killing 12 people and injuring more than 20, railway officials said.

The crash occurred in the morning at the village of Zoufftgen, 1.6 kilometers south of the Luxembourg border, on a section of track undergoing maintenance work.

The French state-owned SNCF rail company said nine passengers had been killed, the drivers of both trains and a person working on the track. At least 21 had been injured some of them seriously.
 
More than a hundred rescue workers from France and Luxembourg were at the scene by early afternoon working to free the injured from the wreckage. A helicopter shuttled victims to hospital.

"It's apocalyptic," said Bertrand Mertz, vice-president of the Lorraine regional council. "There's a mess of steel and tangled metal with wagons up-ended and pointing into the sky."  

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who was en route to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, ordered his plane to return to France in order to visit the scene. President Jacques Chirac issued a statement to express condolences to the bereaved.

The two trains were a double-decker Luxembourg regional express train traveling south to the French city of Nancy and a freight train heading north into Luxembourg.

"As a result of the work only one track was open instead of two and trains were supposed to wait their turn to go on it," an SNCF spokesman said. "For reasons that are not clear these two trains came together head-to-head." 

Guillaume Pepy, SNCF executive director, said the French freight train was the first onto the section of track and that its driver had not ignored a red light. Earlier Mertz told France 3 television that railway signalers in Luxembourg were to blame.

France's last serious rail accident was in 2002 when 12 died in a fire on a night train near Nancy.

Luxembourg's Transport Minister Lucien Lux also went to the scene but his office declined to give any details. Guy Schuller, a Luxembourg government spokesman, said the victims had not yet been identified.

(China Daily October 12, 2006)