ANKARA, July 22: At least 140 people were killed and scores of others injured when a high speed train travelling from Istanbul to Ankara ran off the rails on Thursday night.
The death toll could rise throughout the night, according to health ministry undersecretary Hasan Ali Cevik. The train derailed at 7:45pm (1645 GMT) near the Anatolian city of Sakarya, around 125km east of Istanbul.
According to Muammer Turker, head of a transport ministry crisis desk set up after the crash, there were 234 passengers and nine crew on board the express train which only went into service on June 4 after the old Istanbul-Ankara line was upgraded and straightened.
"It is not possible to say why the crash happened as yet," Mr Turker told reporters, saying the train was travelling at 183km per hour at the time of the derailment.
The new line was heralded by the government as a great development in Turkish transport but it had attracted criticism from various experts who predicted it would only be a matter of time before a derailment occurred.
In an article published just two weeks ago in the Turkish daily Hurriyet, an engineering professor had warned that the line was extremely dangerous.
"Due to the high speed, the rails will break and the high speed train will be expensive to maintain. The weight of the rails will not be enough and if the rails are not mended there will be a crash on the railway," Prof Aydin Erel of Istanbul's Yildiz University said.
Suleyman Karaman, general director of Turkish Railways, immediately rejected claims that the line was unsafe.-dpa
