Cameroon rail accident toll rises to at least 60

YAOUNDÉ: At least 60 were killed when a packed passenger train derailed between Cameroon’s two main cities, a hospital source in the capital Yaounde said on Saturday, giving a new toll the day after the accident.

Almost 600 people were injured when the train, travelling from Yaounde to the economic hub of Douala, came off the rails near the central city of Eseka at around midday on Friday.

“We have received between 60 and 70 bodies at the station this morning,” a railway official who asked not to be identified said in Yaounde on Saturday.

The train was crammed with people because a collapsed bridge had made travelling the same route by road impossible.

“Some of the wounded are arriving unconscious. We think the death toll will rise,” said the railway official, adding that the injured had been taken to various hospitals in the capital.

Passengers’ relatives thronged the city’s main hospital to look for their loved ones. At the hospital’s morgue “there are 28 unidentified bodies. The identified bodies are at another morgue,” said a policeman on duty there. The first person allowed into the morgue, a woman, emerged in tears. “She recognised the body of her sister,” explained one of the people with her.

As she waited her turn to enter, another woman, Fadimatou, said, “We have had no news from our sister since yesterday. We don’t know whether she is alive. “Her phone was ringing yesterday but it wasn’t since this morning. Her husband is looking for her in Douala.”

Dan Njoya said he had come to the morgue “to see if the body of my fourmonth-old baby is here.” Most of those injured were taken to hospitals in Douala. On Friday evening, transport minister said 55 people were known to have died and 575 were injured. Staterun television reported that many of the injured were in a critical condition and that the cause of the accident had not been discovered.