Some participants wanted to mobilize the public in all Arab countries to demonstrate agianst the U.S. aggression

NEW DELHI, September 10 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Twenty-eight people were killed and 182 others injured when a train derailed in eastern India after sabotage on the tracks, the country’s junior railway minister said Tuesday, September 10.

“Twenty-eight people have died and 325 have been transported safely out of the area of the accident,” Minister of State for Railways Bandaru Dattatreya told reporters in the capital New Delhi.

“Another 182 people are injured and have been admitted to various hospitals,” he said.

Dattatreya had earlier said that 100 people were feared dead in the crash, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Separately, the Press Trust of India reported that 50 passengers were rescued out of a carriage that had fallen into the Dhabi river when the train derailed in the eastern state of Bihar.

The news agency, quoting local official S.P. Sirohi, said rescuers entered the carriage using gas welders and that seriously injured passengers were shifted to a hospital in nearby Gaya.

Dattatreya had said the rail tracks were sabotaged, possibly by the Maoist Communist Center (MCC) guerrilla group.

“This tragedy is due to sabotage,” Dattatreya said. “It could be sabotage by the Maoist Communist Center.”

The MCC has been fighting for decades in eastern India against wealthy landowners and the government in an insurgency it says is on behalf of poor farmers and landless laborers, AFP said.

The group has been accused of links with Maoist rebels in adjacent Nepal, where a leftist insurgency has left dead more than 4,400 people since 1996.   

However, Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani expressed doubt that the derailment of a train in eastern India was an act of sabotage.

“I have no such news as now,” he told reporters in New Delhi when asked whether the Rajdhani Express travelling from Calcutta to the capital had been attacked.

“Information that I have indicates it is an accident,” said Advani, who is also India’s home minister.   

Gaya district’s magistrate, Brajesh Malhotra, told AFP that two of the train’s carriages were dangling from a bridge over the rain-swollen river.

Eastern India has been hit for the past few months by severe flooding that has left more than 800 people dead.

Railway officials said 450 passengers were listed on the train out of Calcutta, slightly below capacity.

In New Delhi, Railways Board Chairman I.I.S.M. Rana said army units and the civilian administration in Bihar had been mobilized to join the rescue operation, adding heavy rains and the remoteness of the area were hampering relief work.

Relief trains were being sent to the area and a train for relatives of the passengers was due to leave Tuesday from New Delhi. India’s Railway Minister Nitish Kumar and other senior railway officials headed to the site.

It is the latest tragedy to hit Indian Railways, which is beset by an antiquated rail network and a bloated bureaucracy. In June 2001, 57 people were killed when a train derailed in the southern state of Kerala.

With a staff of 1.6 million people, Indian Railways claims to be the world’s biggest employer and carries about 13 million people a day.

A government report last year found that 515 railway bridges needed to be replaced and that 12,260 kilometers (7,600 miles) of track needed to be repaired.

But there have been few accidents involving the Rajdhani Express, which is fully air-conditioned and on which tickets run as high as 150 dollars.

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