Indian authorities on Tuesday appealed to residents to help identify more than 100 bodies in hospitals and morgues after 275 people were killed in the country’s worst train crash in more than two decades.
The accident occurred on Friday when a passenger train collided with a stopped goods train, causing it to derail and collide with a passenger train in the opposite direction near Balasore district in the eastern state of Odisha.
After vigorous efforts to rescue survivors, evacuate and repair the track, train traffic resumed on this section of the track on Sunday evening.
A senior health ministry official in Odisha state told Reuters that as of Monday evening there were about 100 unidentified bodies.
A senior police official told Reuters that there was a detailed list of specifications for each body, but first relatives were allowed to see the horrific photos of the bodies so they could identify their missing loved ones.
The Railway Board recommended that the Central Bureau of Investigation, a federal agency, investigate the cause of the disaster, while the South-Eastern Circuit Railway Safety Commissioner launched a separate investigation on Monday.
The Central Bureau of Investigation team will arrive at the accident site on Tuesday to start the investigation. Preliminary results indicated that the cause of the accident was most likely a technical malfunction in the signaling system.