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RFL/RE – At least 17 people have been killed and dozens more injured after a train derailed near the central Iranian city of Tabas.
“Seventeen people are dead and 37 injured people have been transferred to hospital,” emergency services spokesman Mojtaba Khaledi told state television on June 8.
According to initial reports, the train was travelling between the pilgrimage city of Mashhad and the desert town of Jasd when it hit an excavator near the tracks in Tabas, some 800 kilometers east of Tehran.
Five of the train’s 11 coaches came off the track in the early morning accident, an official from the Iranian Red Crescent told state television.
The deputy head of Iran’s state-owned railways, Mir Hassan Mussavi, told state broadcaster IRIB that the train was carrying 348 passengers.
Some of those injured were airlifted to hospital by helicopter, state television footage showed.
An investigation was launched into the cause of the accident, Iranian media reported.
Iran’s worst train accident occurred in 2004, when a runaway train loaded with gasoline and chemicals crashed near the historic city of Neyshabur, killing some 320 people, injuring 460 others, and damaging five villages.
The June 8 accident comes after a tower block collapsed in the southwestern city of Abadan last month, killing at least 43 people.
The collapse of the partially finished 10-story Metropol building sparked angry protests in solidarity with the families of the dead.
Iran, straining under U.S. sanctions over its collapsed nuclear deal, has an aging railway system of about 14,000 kilometers.
