56 died in Pakistan train wreck

An express train crowded with holiday travellers derailed in southern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing at least 56 people and injuring another 150. The train was speeding from Karachi toward Lahore when about 12 of its 16 carriages came off the rails near Mehrabpur, about 250 miles north of Karachi.
It was unclear what caused the accident, which left hundreds of terrified survivors to claw their way out of the mangled wreckage in total darkness.
By midmorning, rescuers had brought 56 bodies to three nearby hospitals, said Mumtaz Ali, an official from the Edhi Foundation, Pakistan’s largest privately run emergency service.
Col. Abbas Malik, an army doctor, said about 150 people were injured.
Army engineers used two cranes and cutting equipment to free the last survivors, including a girl about 3 years old with a bloodied left foot, from one of the badly damaged carriages, many of which were thrown down an embankment into a waterlogged field.
Dozens of soldiers and police helped tend the injured and carry them away to waiting ambulances, as hundreds of people from the surrounding villages looked on.
The train, which derailed at about 2 a.m., was loaded with an estimated 900 passengers, many of them heading home for the Islamic holiday of Eid ul-Adha.
Mohammed Khalid, a railway official who was traveling in one of the rear wagons that stayed on the rails, said he suspected a problem with the track possibly sabotage caused the accident.
"My guess is that there was some piece of rail was missing and the engine jumped the missing track and the following wagon got stuck," he said.
After the crash, a section of one of the rails had been torn loose. The engine came to a halt about a mile further up the line.
Deadly accidents are a regular occurrence on Pakistan’s colonial-era railway network.
A speeding train struck a crowded bus at a railway crossing near Lahore in October, killing 12 people and injuring about 50 others. About 130 people died in July 2005 when three trains collided in southern Pakistan.