AZG DAILY #223, 05-12-2009
Russia
Update: 2009-12-05 01:25:44 (GMT +04:00)
FAULTY CHAIRS TO BLAME FOR CASUALTIES IN RUSSIAN TRAIN DERAILMENT
A Russian newspaper reports that most of the fatalities in the recent
Moscow-St. Petersburg train disaster were due to the inferior quality
of chairs and their fittings.
Russian prosecutors have already launched a probe into the case and
the authorities ordered the express train service between Moscow and
St. Petersburg suspended .
In its Friday issue, Kommersant daily wrote that forensic experts
investigating the derailment of the Nevsky Express train, which ran
off the tracks after a bomb explosion on November 27, have established
that the 26 victims were not killed not by the explosion, but were
crushed to death by the train chairs, which tore from their fittings
as the conductor applied the breaks and the cars hit several posts and
crashed into the ground.
The paper quoted Aleksander Romanov, deputy head of the Tver Regional
Bureau of Forensic Medicine as saying that "the causes of passengers’
deaths were the traumas received by hits, pressure and abrasion by
blunt solid objects".
The train was furnished with seats produced in Germany that are more
comfortable than Russian models. However, these chairs are less solid
– in the 2007 attack on the Nevsky Express, all Russian-made chairs
remained in place and the crash did not end in a single fatality.
An official spokesman for the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office told
reporters on Friday that her agency had launched a probe into the
report and would check all certificates for the chairs and cars used
in Russian high-speed trains.
The company that re-equipped the cars for the Nevsky Express said on
Friday that its work had been duly checked and approved by government
agencies. It also said that the chairs were built to withstand the 4G
acceleration – the toughest standard in the world. The acceleration
during the crash proved to be three times higher and this led to the
casualties, the press service of the Tver Car Buildng plant reported,
according to RT.