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By KRISHNA POKHAREL And PAUL BECKETT
NEW DELHI, May 29, 2010 —India's railways minister blamed Maoist rebels
for a train derailment early Friday that killed at least 73 people in
the eastern state of West Bengal.
The passenger train, the Gyaneshwari Express 2102, was traveling from
Kolkata, in eastern India, to a suburb of Mumbai, on India's west coast,
when it derailed and collided with an oncoming cargo train. An 18-inch
section of track was missing, according to a statement from the Home
Ministry in New Delhi. There were conflicting reports of whether an
improvised explosive device also was used.
Maoist leaders, who rarely claim responsibility immediately after
attacks, couldn't be reached for comment Friday.
District official Shubhanjan Das said by late Friday night 73 dead
passengers and more than 200 injured had been taken to local hospitals
for treatment. Mr. Das said efforts were still continuing late Friday
night to remove bodies from four remaining coaches.
The rebels, known as Naxalites after the village of Naxalbari in West
Bengal where the insurgency was hatched in 1967, have been stepping up
their attacks recently and have begun targeting civilians as well as
police and government paramilitary forces. The Maoists dominate swaths
of central India's impoverished states.
The Maoists, who seek to overthrow the Indian government, have stepped
up attacks recently. In April, they killed 76 security personnel in the
Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh state, the highest single death toll
of the insurgency.
The district where the derailment took place, Paschim Medinipur, is one
of the most heavily Naxalite-affected districts in West Bengal. It is
underdeveloped, with dense forests along the state borders with Orissa
and Jharkhand, two eastern Indian states where the insurgents also have
a strong grip.
"We have these people coming from these states, attack here and run back
to those states," Mr. Das said. "Stopping them from moving freely across
the state borders is a challenge that the local administration has been
facing."
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has repeatedly referred to the Maoist
rebellion as the greatest internal security threat that India faces. Yet
while the government has deployed more security forces to help local
police combat rebels and restore civilian rule, New Delhi has been
incapable of quelling the insurgency.
Home Minister P. Chidambaram last week caused a furor when he claimed to
have only a "limited mandate" in fighting the rebels, a remark later
clarified to mean that it was primarily an issue for individual states
to handle with help from the central government.
Government officials and rebels have offered to take part in
negotiations, but neither side has met the other's preconditions for
talks.
Railways Minister Mamata Banerjee, who arrived at the scene in Paschim
Medinipur Friday morning, said Naxalite rebels damaged the railway
tracks, causing the passenger train to derail, and timed the attack so
that it was sure to collide with a goods train coming in the opposite
direction.
"It was a calculated game," she said on television.
The district police said they found posters of a local group that
supports the Naxalites at the site but couldn't say definitively that
Naxalites were behind the sabotage.
According to an account of the incident given by the Ministry of
Railways, the driver of the train heard a loud sound as soon as the
train left an intermediate station, after which 13 coaches were
derailed, some of them falling into the path of a goods train coming
from the opposite direction.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
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