This Article is From Mar 04, 2012

Fifteen dead, 60 injured in Poland train collision

Fifteen dead, 60 injured in Poland train collision
Warsaw: Fifteen people were reported dead in a head-on train crash in Szczekociny, southern Poland, Polish emergency services said on Sunday.

"We know that 15 people are dead. Unfortunately we have not yet been able to remove the body of the last victim," said Pawel Fratczak, a spokesman for firefighters, of the accident that occurred late Saturday.

Some 60 people have been injured and are in hospital, half of them in serious condition, according to emergency services.

Some 350 passengers were travelling on board two trains which collided head-on at 9:00 pm (2000 GMT) as they were travelling on the same track, according to Poland's PKP railways.

One train was en route to the southern city of Krakow from the capital Warsaw, while the other was travelling to the capital from the south-eastern city of Przemysl.

An investigation was launched Sunday morning into the reasons behind the fatal crash as the rescue operations continued in the early hours.

Images of the wreckage broadcast by the TVN24 commercial news channel showed mangled wreckage with reports indicating three carriages had jumped the tracks along with the locomotives from both trains.

"We heard a deafening noise and we were hurled out of our seats," an unnamed survivor told the PAP Polish news agency. "We saw crushed bodies pinned beneath seats and we saw parts of bodies inside and outside the train wagons," the survivor said.

"It was terrifying. The scale of destruction is huge," one of the first firemen on the scene told the PAP.

Another survivor told the TVN24 news channel of dead bodies as well as people still alive but pinned down under twisted metal.

Fireman Grzegorz Widawski described the conditions at the crash site as "very challenging."

"The wagons are in very bad shape and it's difficult to get to the people trapped inside," he told the PAP.

A total 450 firemen and 100 policemen were involved in the rescue efforts, emergency response authorities said.

Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Transport Minister Slawomir Nowak were also expected at the crash site overnight, according to a government statement.

Saturday's accident is the worst rail catastrophe in Poland since 1990, when 16 people were killed in a collision between two trains in the Warsaw suburb of Ursus.

The country's most deadly train wreck occurred in 1980 in Otoczyn, near the northern city of Torun when 67 people died and 62 were injured in a collision between a passenger and a freight train.
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