SAMALIYA, India, 22 April 2005 — At least 24 people were killed when a crowded passenger train slammed into a stationary freight train in western India early yesterday, throwing cars off the tracks, a top railway official said.

Over 90 people were injured, 20 of them seriously, in the collision in Samaliya, a village at Gujarat state.

It was not immediately clear what caused the accident, though one official said a signal failure might be to blame.

Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, who visited the site of the accident, announced a compensation of Rs 100,000 for each of the dead and Rs 15,000 for each injured. Before leaving for Samaliya, Lalu said that either signal failure or human error had caused the accident.

Soldiers used metal cutters to extract about 80 passengers trapped in a coach that had climbed over another, as anxious relatives awaited word about their loved ones.

“I was sleeping when I fell from the upper berth. There was a deafening crash. We tried getting out of the coach, but the door was jammed,” said passenger Preeti Thakkar, 23, who was in a hospital with an injured collarbone from her fall.

The accident occurred when a passenger train coming from the Varanasi hit the freight train at the Samaliya station, about 36 kilometers west of the city of Vadodara.

At least five of the cars derailed and fell on their sides.

Lalu was heckled by a crowd of about 1,000 and stones were thrown at his car when he visited the main hospital in Vadodara where 72 of the injured were being treated. No one was injured in the confrontation.

Earlier, when Lalu visited the crash site and spoke to railway officials, he did not speak to the hundreds of passengers and their relatives still at Samaliya station.

“It took the railway minister more than eight hours to reach the site. And when he reached the hospital, the police would not let us talk to him,” said Navin Shah, who was searching for his father, a passenger on the train.

Villagers from Samaliya and other nearby communities were the first to reach the train and began pulling people out of the fallen coaches. Firefighters and soldiers used a hydraulic ladder to reach the top of a coach that had climbed over another and cut through the top with blowtorches to rescue people trapped inside.

Railway officials said all the train coaches were full when the train started out from Varanasi and that at least 432 passengers were aboard.

“We fear around 80 people are still trapped in one of the coaches,” said Gujarat Railway Minister Narayan Singh Rathore, who was supervising the rescue operation.

The injured, many of them bleeding and groaning, were taken to hospitals in Vadodara; at least 10 were reportedly in serious condition. Many of the passengers were sleeping when the accident occurred around 3:30 a.m. (2200 GMT Wednesday).

“It was terrible. People were screaming in the dark and everyone was pushing to get out of the train,” said Thakkar, who was traveling with her parents.

After about two hours, Thakkar said, soldiers were able to cut through the door of the coach and pull out those trapped inside. Thakkar was taken to hospital by rescue workers and said she had no word about her parents.

“I don’t know about my parents. I have not seen them since it happened,” she said, weeping.