Maoist rebels were suspected of having derailed an overnight passenger train Friday in eastern India, triggering a crash with an oncoming cargo train that killed at least 71 people and injured about 200 more, officials said.
Survivors described a night of screaming and chaos after the derailment and said it took rescuers more than three hours to reach the scene.
The blue passenger train and the red cargo train were knotted together in mangled metal along a rural stretch of track near the small town of Sardiha, about 90 miles west of Calcutta in West Bengal state.
Sher Ali, a 25-year-old Mumbai factory worker, was traveling with his wife, two children and his brother's family when they were jerked awake by a loud thud. A moment later, their car was tossed from the track, he said.
"My sister-in-law was crushed when the coach overturned. We saw her dying, but we couldn't do anything to help her," said Ali, who had cuts on his head and arms.
The rest of the family survived, though a 10-year-old nephew was badly injured and hospitalized.
Ali was unable to go to the hospital, though, because all his money was in his luggage inside the wreckage and he was afraid it would be stolen unless he kept watch.
'Crying for help'
A reporter for the Telegraph newspaper described a scene of chaos and panic at the site.
"I can see body parts hanging out of the compartments and under the wheels," Naresh Jana told Reuters. "I can hear people, women, crying for help from inside the affected coaches."
Officials disagreed on the cause of the derailment, with some saying it was caused by an explosion but others blaming sabotaged rail lines.
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Train 'sabotage' kills dozens in India
Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said in a statement that a section of the railway tracks had been cut, but "whether explosives were used is not yet clear."
"The driver heard a loud noise which indicates there could be a blast. A detailed investigation will reveal more, but definitely there was a lot of tinkering done to the tracks," Vivek Sahay, a senior railway official, told reporters. "It was definitely sabotage."
The passenger train was traveling from Calcutta to the Mumbai suburb of Kurla when 13 cars derailed. A cargo train then slammed into three of the cars from the other direction, Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee said.
Nearly 10 hours after the blast, railway police and paramilitary soldiers were still using blowtorches and cables to try to reach at least a dozen passengers still trapped in the wreckage, said A.P. Mishra, general manager of the railway system in that area.
Helicopters were eventually brought in to help evacuate the injured to local hospitals, officials said.
Bhupinder Singh, the top police official in West Bengal, said posters from the People's Committee Against Police Atrocities, a group that local officials believe is closely tied to the Maoists, had been found at the scene taking responsibility for the attack.
'Not our act'
However, a spokesman for the group, Asit Mahato, denied any role, the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency reported.
"We were in no way involved. This is not our act," PTI quoted him as saying by phone. "What can we do if somebody claims responsibility on our behalf?" he told PTI when asked about the posters found near the scene.
The area is an isolated, rural stronghold of India's Maoist rebels, known as Naxalites, who have stepped up attacks in recent months and had called for a four-day general strike starting Friday.
The rebels, who have tapped into the rural poor's growing anger at being left out of the country's economic gains, are now present in 20 of the country's 28 states and have an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 fighters, according to the Home Ministry.
Earlier this month, they ambushed a bus in central India, killing 31 police officers and civilians.
In April, 76 police were killed in an ambush in one of the heaviest tolls in years. And in March, police suspected their hand in the derailment of India's most prestigious high-speed Rajdhani Express.
Banerjee, the railway minister, said that trains were under orders to travel slowly through the region — in part so the drivers can keep watch for sabotaged tracks or bombs and in part so the effects of a crash are lessened if a train does derail.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described the insurgency as India's biggest internal security challenge and his Congress-led government has been under increasing political pressure to deal with the insurgents.
The incident comes days after a passenger airliner crashed in southern India, killing 158 people, underscoring safety issues and concern that India's aging infrastructure was failing to keep pace with an economic boom.
