At least 261 people have been killed and 1,000 are injured in a crash involving three trains in India’s eastern Odisha state, officials say.
One passenger train derailed on to the adjacent track and was struck by an incoming train on Friday, also hitting a nearby stationary freight train.
A massive rescue operation was launched, with hundreds of emergency services searching the wreckage.
It is India’s worst train crash this century and the cause is not yet clear.
Officials said several carriages from the Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express derailed at about 19:00 (13:30 GMT) in Balasore district, hit a stationary goods train and several of its coaches ended up on the opposite track.
Another train – the Howrah Superfast Express travelling from Yesvantpur to Howrah – then hit the overturned carriages.
“The force with which the trains collided has resulted in several coaches being crushed and mangled,” Atul Karwal, chief of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) told news agency ANI.
It was the third deadliest crash in the history of Indian railways, he said.
More than 200 ambulances and hundreds of doctors, nurses and rescue personnel were sent to the scene, the state’s chief secretary Pradeep Jena said.
Sudhanshu Sarangi, director general of Odisha Fire Services, had earlier said 288 had died.
The rescue operation recovering people from the wreckage has finished and work to restore the site of the crash has begun, India’s South Eastern Railway company said on Saturday.
All trapped and injured passengers have been rescued. It is not clear how serious the injuries of those taken to local hospitals were.
Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw was at the site of the accident and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was expected to visit the injured in hospital later on Saturday.
One male survivor said that “10 to 15 people fell on me when the accident happened and everything went haywire. I was at the bottom of the pile.
Eyewitness: ‘I survived but many died around me’
“I got hurt in my hand and also the back of my neck. When I came out, I saw someone had lost their hand, someone had lost their leg, while someone’s face was distorted,” the survivor told India’s ANI news agency.
Residents of the neighbouring villages were among the first to reach the site of the accident and start the rescue operation.
India has one of the largest train networks in the world with millions of passengers using it daily, but a lot of the railway infrastructure needs improving.
Trains can get very packed at this time of year, with a growing number of people travelling during school holidays.
Both passenger trains involved in the crash were full and had many more people on the waiting list, according to passenger lists on the Indian rail ministry website reviewed by the BBC.
India’s worst train disaster was in 1981, when an overcrowded passenger train was blown off the tracks and into a river during a cyclone in Bihar state, killing at least 800 people.
