NEW DELHI — India’s federal crime agency said Friday it has arrested three railway officials in connection with one of the country’s deadliest train accidents, which killed more than 290 people last month.
The arrested men were charged with manslaughter without murder and destruction of evidence, the Central Bureau of Investigation said in a statement. He identified them as two signal engineers and a technician and said the investigation is ongoing.
The June train accident in the eastern state of Odisha occurred when a packed passenger train mistakenly diverted onto an adjacent loop line where it collided with a parked freight train loaded with iron ore. The collision derailed the passenger train cars onto another track where they collided with a passing train traveling in the opposite direction.
The two passenger trains were carrying more than 2,290 people when the collision occurred. About 1,000 people were injured.
After the accident, Indian Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the cause of the accident was related to the signaling system.
India, a country of 1.42 billion people, has one of the longest and most complicated railways in the world built during the British colonial era: more than 40,000 miles of track, 14,000 passenger trains and 8,000 stations. Spread across the country from the Himalayas in the north to the beaches in the south, it too is a system weakened by decades of mismanagement and neglect.
Despite efforts to improve safety, several hundred accidents occur each year, with the majority of these crashes attributed to human error or outdated signaling equipment.
The June accident was the deadliest in India since 1995, when two trains collided near New Delhi, killing 358 people. In 2016, a passenger train skidded off the tracks between the cities of Indore and Patna, killing 146 people.
