BAHANAGA, India — At least 288 people have died in India’s worst rail crash in over two decades, officials said on Saturday after a passenger train went off the tracks and hit another one in an accident a preliminary report blamed on signal failure. The death toll has reached 288, said K. S. Anand, chief public relations officer of the South Eastern Railway. Its coaches then fell onto the tracks on either side, also derailing the Howrah Superfast Express,” he said. Video footage showed derailed train coaches and damaged tracks, with rescue teams searching the mangled carriages to pull the survivors out and rush them to the hospital. India’s deadliest railway accident was in 1981 when a train plunged off a bridge into a river in Bihar state, killing an estimated 800 people.
