Nearly 300 killed in Iran train blast
At least 295 people were killed in the Iran train explosion, state radio reported today. But other officials gave lower figures.
Vahid Barakchi, a senior official in Khorasan Province’s Emergency Headquarters, told the radio station that 295 people had been killed and 450 injured in yesterday’s blast.
But the acting governor of Neyshabur, Mohammad Alajgardi, said that about 180 bodies had been recovered by this morning.
The explosion of the runaway train wagons loaded with fuel and chemicals devastated five villages and left a crater about 50ft deep.
Firefighters battled freezing temperatures and toxic fumes overnight, finally extinguishing the blaze shortly after dawn today.
The blast threw people’s limbs hundreds of meters away from the railway tracks.
For miles around the scene, the fumes of the sulphur, petrol, fertilisers and cotton that wagons were carrying made it almost impossible to breathe.
Dozens of people were thought to be trapped in their homes of mud and clay near the train tracks, said Barakchi.
“The scale of the devastation is very great, and the damage appears to be more than initially thought,” he said.
In the village of Dehnow, which was closest to the blast, nearly all of the 150 inhabitants were killed, said 17-year-old Mohammad Tazegi, one of the few survivors.
The village, around 550 yards from the blast, was flattened as if hit by an earthquake.
Many local people found the explosion outside Neyshabur, an ancient city 400 miles east of the capital, Tehran, to be so powerful that they did think it was an earthquake. It shattered windows as far as six miles away.
Iranian seismologists recorded a 3.6-magnitude tremor at the exact time of the blast, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported, in what was an apparent indication of the explosion’s force.
“The entire area around me shook,” said Hussein Hassani, who saw the blast from several miles away. “It felt like a strong earthquake, but because the buildings didn’t collapse (where I was) I knew it wasn’t. Smoke could be seen ... for hours.”
