RAFIGANJ (India), Sept 10: A luxury express train jumped the tracks on a bridge over a river in eastern India on Monday night, killing at least 80 people in what one minister said could have been an act of sabotage.

But Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, who is also India’s interior minister, played down the sabotage theory, saying information he had received pointed to an accident.

The airconditioned Rajdhani Express, bound for New Delhi from Kolkata, was carrying 605 people when it crashed near Rafiganj, 210 kilometres south of Bihar state capital, Patna, an area where Maoist rebels are active.

At least 180 passengers were injured.

Rescue workers using gas-cutters struggled to pull victims from the mangled cars. Bodies lay alongside the twisted wreckage covered in white sheets, many surrounded by weeping relatives.

“We were all asleep and suddenly the whole thing went zigzag and everything started to fall on top of me,” passenger Mohammed Irshad said, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“It lasted a couple of minutes. When it was over, I realised my wife and children had been crushed to death.”

His children were two- and three-years-old.

A railway official said there could be some more bodies trapped in one of the coaches which was badly damaged.

Earlier in the day, the junior minister for railways, Bandaru Dattatreya, said he feared the death toll could touch 100.

Five coaches piled on top of each other after one side of the bridge collapsed into the river whose muddy waters were ankle-deep.

Survivors seeking missing people frantically called their names over a squeaky public address system as soldiers using bamboos canes drove back a huge crowd of onlookers.

The railway minister said the train carriages veered off the tracks because fish plates and bolts which bind them had been removed, possibly by Maoist radicals who are active in the area.—Reuters\AFP