At least 50 people were killed in Taiwan on Friday when a packed train collided with a vehicle on the tracks and then derailed inside a tunnel, in the island’s worst railway accident in decades.
Officials said the devastating collision was caused by a railway maintenance vehicle which slipped down an embankment above the tracks near the eastern coastal city of Hualien.
“(The driver) was suspected of not pulling the parking brake tight enough so the vehicle slid 20 meters... onto the train line,” Feng Hui-sheng, deputy director of Taiwan Railways Authority, told reporters.
Local media images from the scene showed the back of a yellow flatbed truck on its side next to the train just a few metres from the tunnel entrance.
The eight-carriage train was packed with some 480 people heading down the east coast for the annual Tomb Sweeping Festival, a four-day public holiday.
The Taiwan Railways Agency said 146 passengers were sent to hospital in addition to the 51 confirmed dead.
A French national was among those killed while two Japanese and one Macau resident were injured.
One unnamed female survivor told TVBS news channel of trapped passengers — some crying out for help, others unconscious.
President Tsai Ing-wen visited an emergency response centre in the capital Taipei, and said investigators would get to the bottom of how such a deadly crash could have occurred.
“We will definitely clarify the cause of the incident that has caused major casualties,” she told reporters.
Published - April 02, 2021 09:41 am IST
