Wednesday, October 21, 2009 NEW DELHI: An express train ploughed into the back of another in northern India early Wednesday, killing up to 15 people and leaving up to 50 trapped in the wreckage, television channels reported. The local channel, quoting a local senior superintendent of police, said 15 bodies had been pulled from the site of the crash on tracks outside the town of Mathura, 150 kilometers (93 miles) south of New Delhi. Vijay Kumar, another senior police official in the nearby town of Agra, home to the Taj Mahal, told the channel that the crash happened at 5:30 am local time (0000 GMT), but declined to give figures for dead or injured. He said the Goa Express had run into the back of a stationary train outside Mathura station. Rescuers were using mechanical cutters to cut through the bars on the windows of the badly crushed last carriage of the stationary train to reach people feared trapped inside. The news channel put the death toll at 10-12, with 40-50 feared trapped.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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