Monday, April 25 2005 19:40 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Japan: At least 50 people were killed and some 400 injured on Monday when a commuter train derailed, sending a carriage hurtling into an apartment block in Japan's deadliest rail accident in four decades.

Authorities suspected that the train's 23-year-old driver was speeding and failed to negotiate a corner, throwing four of the train's seven carriages from the tracks in Amagasaki, a working-class western town near Osaka and Kobe.

The train, which was carrying some 580 passengers in the morning rush hour, appeared to be speeding, as the driver was running late after he missed a station and had to back up to let off passengers.

The remains of one carriage were strewn across the apartment building up to the third floor, with rescue crews racing to tear through the metal to find any survivors. Another carriage lay tilted on the ground beside it.

"We have confirmed the deaths of 25 males and 24 females. We are yet to identify the gender of one body," said a spokesman for the fire department in Amagasaki, some 400 kilometers west of Tokyo.

A police spokesman said that 417 people were injured. "Passengers who were standing were thrown away and passengers who were sitting were slammed onto the floor. It was just chaos," said Tsuneo Hara, an advertising company employee from Osaka, who was hospitalised for a leg injury.

"Some 10 people could not stand up and lay on the floor motionless. Female passengers were just screaming and crying," Hara said. Relatives rushed between hospitals to look at lists for any clue as to whether their loved ones were dead or alive.

"My husband is still missing. I don't know what to do," said a sobbing Naoko Fukunishi after checking the lists at Amagasaki Central Hospital. "We just celebrated his 61st birthday yesterday."

A gymnasium was turned into a makeshift morgue, as families some stoic and others full of emotion went in by twos and threes to see the bodies. Only 11 have so far been identified, a railway spokesman said.

Japan has one of the world's most extensive and safest train networks, transporting some 60 million people, or nearly half the nation's population, each day.

It was the deadliest tragedy since 1963 when a freight train collided with a truck in Yokohama near Tokyo and then was hit by two passenger trains from opposite directions. That accident killed 161 people.

"This is a horrible and serious disaster," Transport Minister Kazuo Kitagawa said, as he visited the scene Monday, ordering a "thorough investigation".

Photographs taken inside the train showed metal frames severed open by the force of the crash. Dozens of people were lying on the floor, with a few struggling to stand up and flee.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi urged renewed attention to safety after the crash. "People must always be careful. They must respond to this firmly in order to prevent future accidents," said Koizumi.

The last accident of such magnitude in Japan was on May 14, 1991, when a head-on crash between trains in Shiga prefecture, also in western Japan, killed 42 passengers and injured 527 more.