MUMBAI: India’s federal police arrested three railway employees on Friday in connection with the country’s deadliest train crash in two decades that killed 292 people last month, the crime agency said in a statement.

The arrests were made under Indian penal code sections related to culpable homicide and causing evidence to disappear, according to the statement from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

Of the three people arrested, two are engineers and one worked as a technician for the railways.

The June 2 crash at Bahanaga Bazar station, in the eastern state of Odisha, injured more than 1,000 people.

It was India’s worst train crash in more than two decades.

The accident happened when a passenger train hit a stationary freight train, jumped off the tracks and hit another passenger train coming from the opposite direction.

The CBI had launched an investigation after registering a case of criminal negligence.

The investigation into the case was continuing, the CBI said.

Sources said earlier this week that workers repairing a rail-road barrier had made faulty connections in the automated signalling system on the network.

In a report prepared by the Commission of Railway Safety, investigators said the first collision occurred due to modifications made to the signalling circuit to fix frequent problems at a nearby rail-road barrier.

Local railway staff did not have a staandard circuit diagram which led to a faulty connection in the signalling system when they tried to take the boom-barrier circuit offline for repair, it said. The malfunctioning system directed the passenger train onto the path of the freight train, it said.

Indian Railways, the fourth largest train network in the world, is a state monopoly run by the railway board. The board reports to the railways ministry.

Published in Dawn, July 8th, 2023