New Delhi: Railway Minister Nitish Kumar on June 14 described as "preliminary" the report submitted by Commissioner of Railway Safety, North-Eastern Railway, on Frontier Mail fire tragedy and said the government was awaiting forensic report to ascertain the cause of the blaze.

"It is a preliminary report, we have to wait till the Forensic Science Laboratory, Chandigarh submit its findings on the exact reason behind the Frontier Mail fire tragedy," said Kumar after inaugurating a two- day seminar on Emerging Technologies in Safety and Customer Satisfaction.

Stating that the tragedy was unfortunate, he said in the larger interest of the Railways and the country "we must know the exact causes behind the unusual fire".

He said, to avoid occurrence of fire accidents on trains, Integral Coach Factory, Chennai was experimenting fireproof coaches.

A statutory probe into the Frontier Mail fire, near Ludhiana in May that claimed 36 lives, has not been able to trace the cause of the tragedy pending forensic report.

An official release had said Commissioner of Rail safety Bhupinder Singh, who held a statutory enquiry into the fire in three coaches of Frontier Mail on May 15, was unable to come to a conclusion as to how the fire started till he received the forensic report.

PTI