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Thirteen Killed in Kenya Train Crash
A commuter train has ploughed off the rails in western Kenya, killing 13 people and injuring 36 others, police said on Wednesday.
The train, which was travelling between Butere in western Kenya and Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria, ploughed off the rails near the town of Lela, about 400 km (250 miles) northwest of Nairobi, on Tuesday evening.
Police said 13 people had been killed, most of them crushed to death as four of the train's coaches toppled over. Over 400 people were on the train.
Rescuers struggled for several hours to free passengers trapped in the overturned coaches, their efforts hampered by poor weather conditions.
"We have finished the exercise," David Korir, the provincial police officer for the area told Reuters. "There are 13 dead. Ten are adults and three are children."
Korir said 36 people had been injured and 19 admitted to hospital, three of them in serious condition.
He said all the dead and injured were Kenyans, although there might have been some foreigners among the passengers who escaped unscathed.
Kenya Railway officials began to sift through the wreckage to determine the cause of the crash. Spokesman Eric Kathanga said details from the scene remained sketchy.
"We are waiting for more reports from the scene," he said. "It was raining, it was pouring hard at the time of the accident."
A police officer at the scene who declined to be identified said the train had come off the rails just after negotiating a bend on a steep slope.
A local television station said the train might have been speeding.
In 1993, about 140 people were killed when a Mombasa-bound passenger train carrying 600 people plunged into a crocodile-infested river, and in March last year 32 people were killed in a crash inside the Tsavo safari park.
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