Last Updated: 2/22/2004 9:41:41 AM
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Iran Leader Orders Train Explosion Probe

DEHNOW, Iran (AP) -- Rail services, halted for two days after an explosion on runaway train cars killed 320 people, resumed Friday on tracks set up to divert traffic around the accident site, after President Mohammad Khatami called for an extensive probe into the catastrophe.

Officials speculated as to what caused the train cars, carrying a lethal mix of chemicals and fuel, to roll out of a rail yard, catch fire and then explode. The provincial governor said it was probably a result of negligence or brake failure. A railway official said a storm might have loosened a wedge that blocked the front car's wheels.

Relatives of the victims were allowed close to the explosion site for the first time since the train cars exploded at dawn Wednesday. The blast injured 460 people and damaged five villages.

"Oh God. What has happened to us?" cried one woman who lost her father. A male relative was pulling her away.

Iran was holding parliamentary elections Friday, but there was no voting in Dehnow. Mobile polling stations did operate in nearby villages.
The station nearest this village of 400 people was still standing, though walls were damaged, windows were broken and trees had fallen. Smoke rose over the site of the explosion, and bulldozers and rescue workers continued clearing the area, removing debris and looking for body parts.

At least four trains passed through the devastated village Friday on two miles of new track, said Majid Asgarian, a local railway official. Passengers on one train gathered by the windows, some taking pictures of the ruin.

Khatami on Thursday called for an extensive probe into the causes of the train derailment in this village 400 miles east of Tehran.

The train was loaded with gasoline, fertilizer, sulfur and cotton when it somehow started rolling out of a railyard before dawn Wednesday. It traveled 30 miles before hitting a sharp turn at the next station. There, all but three cars derailed, some catching fire.

The wrecked train burned for more than five hours before its hazardous cargo exploded, killing firefighters, rescue workers, spectators and villagers. The blast collapsed mud homes in five villages, shattered windows as far as six miles away and left a 50-foot-deep crater.

A provincial official said Thursday two possible causes of the crash were being investigated.

"One ... is negligence of the personnel at the station and the other is technical failure of the braking system," said Hassan Rasouli, governor of Iran's northeastern Khorasan province.

Rasouli said the iron wedge that was used to secure the lead wagon's wheels had been broken, and it was not known whether the brakes on the individual wagons were working.

The deputy head of Khorasan's railway department, Mohammad Sadeq Barzanoni, said a strong storm the day before the accident might have dislodged the wedge. The train - on its way from central Asia to Iran's southern port of Bandar Abbas - had been parked in a station since Monday.

"This is one of the possibilities," Barzanoni told The Associated Press. "Human error is clearly another possibility" as railway workers might not have placed the wedge securely.

Railway managers in the city of Neyshabur were called in for questioning as the investigators prepared an accident report, said Asgarian, the local railway official.

"The investigation is going slowly because all the officials who came to investigate the initial incident are now dead," Asgarian said.
Source: Shot4u Studios