China sacks senior officials after train crash

China sacks senior officials after train crash

China sacked three senior railway officials on Sunday after a deadly collision between two high-speed trains in the east of the country killed at least 34 and seriously injured 12, in the country's deadliest train disaster since 2008. The crash happened late on Saturday after one train lost power due to a lightning strike, and the bullet train behind crashed into it, state media said, raising new questions about the safety of the fast-growing rail network. Authorities moved quickly to try and assuage public anger by sacking the head of the Shanghai railway bureau, his deputy and the bureau's Communist Party chief, the Railways Ministry said in a statement on its website (www.china-mor.gov.cn). The three will "also be subject to investigation," the brief statement added, without elaborating. The Shanghai bureau is responsible for the province in which the accident happened. The disaster killed at least 34 people, while almost 200 people remain in hospital, 12 of whom are in critical condition, state television said. Two foreigners also died in the accident, which took place on a bridge near the city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang province, some 860 miles south of Beijing, state news agency Xinhua said on Sunday. China News Service, a semi-official news agency, said one of them was a woman in her 20s. Dozens of rescue workers and firefighters used excavators to move the wreckage of the two trains as they believed more bodies were in one of the carriages that was dangling beside the bridge. It was unclear how many people were on the trains at the time of the accident. In a small piece of good news, state television said rescuers had pulled a 4-year-old boy and another male toddler alive from the wreckage. "The task for us now is to clear the debris and also to check for survivors in those areas that we have not gone to," said 35-year-old rescue worker Wang Jun. "Also, we are trying to get the railway line to be operational again." Rail remains the most popular method of long-distance transport in China and trains are usually extremely crowded, with long-distance trains carrying as many as 1,000 passengers.