At least 14 people were killed and 84 injured after a train crash in Bekasi in Indonesia, east of the capital Jakarta.
The city's police chief said a long-distance train ran into the back carriage of a commuter train, reserved for women, which was at a stop at the time. A railway representative said a taxi may have hit the commuter train at a level crossing. Investigations were continuing on Tuesday.
Rescue teams worked through the night to extract bodies and survivors from the wreckage, cutting through the metal structure of the commuter train. It was a delicate process, said Mohammad Syafifi, head of Indonesia’s search-and-rescue agency.
All 240 passengers of the long-distance train were safely evacuated.
“We needed to involve personnel with certain skills to perform a measured extrication,” he said. He added that some people were alive but remained “pinned to the train structure”.
Sausan Sarifah, 29, was on the commuter train when the collision took place. “I thought I was going to die,” she said from her hospital bed, suffering from a broken arm and a deep cut to her thigh. “It all happened so fast, in a split second.”
Hundreds of bystanders were watching the rescue operations, while people attended hospitals nearby to track down injured family members.
Transport accidents are relatively common in Indonesia mainly because of ageing infrastructure. The last serious train collision in the country was in West Java in January 2024, when four crew members were killed and more than 20 people were injured.
