Boy rescues brother, 10, from under heap of seven bodies in train crash carnage

06 June 2023 , 09:33

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Last Friday, a train crashed near the district of Balasore (Image: National Disaster Response Force/HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

A young boy has told of his horror in being rescued by his older brother from under piles of bodies in the aftermath of a train crash.

Last Friday, a train crashed near the district of Balasore, eastern India, causing devastation and killing 278 people and injuring around 1,200 more.

It was India's worst train crash for more than two decades and has been blamed on a signalling failure.

The passenger train took an incorrect signal and entered a side track used for parking where it rammed into a freight train loaded with iron ore.

After the trains collided, one young boy found himself trapped beneath the weight of several bodies.

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Debasish Patra, 10, was left trapped under the weight of seven dead bodies before he was miraculously rescued by his older brother and villagers on Saturday, after hours of a desperate rescue operation.

Wrecked carriages at the accident site of the train collision near Balasore (AFP via Getty Images)

Debasish and some members of his family were travelling to Bhadrak in Odisha when disaster struck.

"A few minutes after the train left Balasore on Friday evening, I was sitting next to my mother and suddenly there was a huge sound followed by a massive jerk and everything went dark.

"I lost consciousness. When I opened my eyes, I was in terrible pain and trapped under a heap of bodies," he told the Times of India.

One local hospital is starting to embalm [preserve] the unidentified victims, with more than 100 bodies still yet to be claimed by families.

Rescuers work at the site of a train collision (Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock)

Distraught relatives of passengers killed in the crash lined up outside the eastern city’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

Outside the hospital, two large screens cycled through photos of the bodies, the faces so bloodied and charred that they were hardly recognizable.

Each body had a number assigned to it, and relatives stood near the screen and watched as the photos changed, looking for details like clothing for clues.

A woman tries to find her injured son (IDREES MOHAMMED/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

Many of the people said they spent days on desperate journeys from neighbouring states, travelling on multiple trains, buses or rented cars to identify and claim bodies, a process that stretched into a third day.

So far only 45 bodies have been identified, and 33 have been handed over to relatives, said Mayur Sooryavanshi, an administrator who was overseeing the identification process at the hospital in the capital of Odisha state.

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Doctors attend to a survivor of the train accident (Getty Images)

Upendra Ram began searching for his son, Retul Ram, on Sunday after travelling 520 miles from neighbouring Bihar state.

"I just want to take the dead body and go back home. He was a very good son", Ram said to AP.

He continued: "My wife and daughter can’t stop crying at home. They are asking me to bring the body back quickly."

Rachel Hagan