KOLKATA, India: India will launch an investigation on Tuesday into a train collision that killed nine people in the state of West Bengal and injured more than 50, a day after a top railway official blamed the incident on driver error.

The death toll was revised down to nine from 15 after Monday’s accident, in which a freight train rammed into a passenger train heading for the state capital of Kolkata from the northeastern state of Tripura.

The investigation by India’s top railway safety official will start on Tuesday, Chetan Kumar Shrivastava, general manager of the Northeast Frontier railway, where the accident happened, told Reuters.

“The inquiry will involve eye-witness accounts, scrutiny of official documents and statements from railway officials, regarding signaling and other mandatory safety issues,” he added.

On Monday, India’s top railway official said the driver of the freight train, who was among the dead, disregarded a signal, leading to the crash with the Kanchanjunga Express, which had halted near a railway station in the district of Darjeeling.

There were 1,400 people aboard, a railway spokesperson said.

But media said an automatic signaling system had not been working from Monday morning, prompting authorities to advise train drivers to proceed slower than usual, in a process known as “paper signals.”

India’s opposition leaders criticized the railway safety record of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, attributing it to negligence.

The incident came a little over a year after about 288 people were killed in one of India’s worst rail crashes in the neighboring state of Odisha, caused by a signaling error.

State-run Indian Railways, notorious for overcrowding, is the world’s fourth largest train network, carrying 13 million people a day, along with nearly 1.5 billion tons of freight in 2022.

In remarks to media on Monday, top railway official Jaya Varma Sinha, who chairs India’s railway board, called for human error to be reduced, adding that an anti-collision system was being set up nationwide.

Partial services resumed on the affected tracks on Tuesday, with some trains diverted and others running slower than usual, railway officials said.

ROME: Eleven people died and more than 60 were missing, including 26 children, following two migrant shipwrecks off Italy’s southern shores, aid groups, coast guard officials and UN agencies said on Monday.

German aid group RESQSHIP, which operates the Nadir rescue boat, said it picked up 51 people from a sinking wooden boat, including two who were unconscious, and found 10 bodies trapped in the lower deck of the vessel.
Survivors were handed over to the Italian coast guard and taken ashore on Monday morning, while the Nadir was making its way to the Italian island of Lampedusa, towing the wooden boat with the deceased, the charity said.
The UN refugee agency UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration and UN children’s agency UNICEF said in a joint statement the boat had set off from Libya, carrying migrants from Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The second shipwreck took place about 200 km (125 miles) east of the Italian region of Calabria, as a boat that had set off from Turkiye caught fire and overturned, the agencies said.
They said 64 people were missing at sea, while 11 were rescued and taken ashore by the Italian coast guard, along with the body of a woman.
Shakilla Mohammadi, a staffer of the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) charity, said she heard from survivors that 66 people were unaccounted for, including at least 26 children, some only a few months old.
“Entire families from Afghanistan are presumed dead. They left from Turkiye eight days ago and had taken in water for three or four days. They told us they had no life vests and some vessels did not stop to help them,” she said in a statement.
The UN agencies said migrants from the second shipwreck came from Iran, Syria and Iraq.
The incidents confirmed the central Mediterranean’s reputation as one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes. According to UN data, more than 23,500 migrants have died or gone missing in its waters since 2014.
UN agencies called on EU governments to step up Mediterranean search and rescue efforts and expand legal and safe migration channels, so that migrants “are not forced to risk their lives at sea.”
Earlier this month 11 bodies were recovered from the sea off the coast of Libya, while last year another migrant boat that had set off from Turkiye smashed into rocks just off the town of Cutro in Calabria, killing at least 94 people.