There was a sudden ball of fire in the Delhi-Attari special train as it moved at its normal speed with most passengers asleep.
Updated at 4.05 pm
AMBALA/PANIPAT: There was a sudden ball of fire in the train as it moved at its normal speed with most of the passengers asleep, recounts a woman travelling on the Delhi-Attari special train that was hit by suspected IED blasts near Panipat.
A Saharanpur resident, Zubaida, who was going to Karachi in Pakistan, said that around midnight there was noise and shouts of fire from the passengers.
"Initially, I and other passengers failed to understand as to what had happened," she said at the railway station here, where the train made a special halt.
Zubaida, who was travelling in the three-tier sleeper bogie adjacent to the one that was burned said, "After looking outside, I and other passengers found that the bogies behind ours were on fire".
"Immediately, there was panic among the passengers who started running for safety. There was chaos in the train," she added.
"I fell down as all the passengers were in a hurry to run to safety to other bogies. In the process I injured my leg," Zubaida, who is continuing her journey to Karachi, said.
Another passenger, Aziz Ahmed, a resident of Delhi, who was to Rawalpindi, injured his hand in the commotion that followed the blast.
"I was travelling in the general bogie when the fire took place between 11.45 pm and midnight," he said.
Immediately after seeing fire emanate from two coaches of the train, passengers pulled the emergency chain.
He said two co-passengers jumped from the running train.
While five bogies of the train, including two badly burnt ones, have been kept at Diwana, the other 11 bogies left the Ambala Cantonment railway station after a check.
Divisional Railway Manager of Ambala HK Jaggi and Railway Police Force Commandant SZ Khan supervised checking of the train at the local railway station for any suspicious object.
Some of the injured were given first-aid by railway doctors and a medical relief train was sent to Diwana from here, a railway spokesman said.
Kamaruddin, 60, from Multan in Pakistan, said chaos spread quickly through the train after a deadly cocktail of kerosene and explosives went off.
"I was sitting towards the end of one of the two coaches when I heard a deafening sound within few feet away from me," said Kamaruddin, who uses only one name.
"The whole place was full of smoke and I could hear a lot of people screaming for help but I could not move."
He was taken unconscious from the scene at Deewana and awoke at a nearby hospital in Panipat. A crowd of other injured survivors and frantic relatives struggled at the hospital to make sense of the attack.
"There was a huge fire and I saw smoke coming out," said Usman Ali, who hails from Lahore, just over the border in Pakistan.
"When I came out of the coach, I saw that the doors of one (carriage) were closed and people could not escape," he said.
A man who identified himself only as Anwar said four of his Pakistani relatives from a family of six, including two children, were among the 66 dead.
He held the hope that two boys had survived but was unable to enter Panipat's Phim Sensachar Civil Hospital to check.
"The doctors are not allowing me to go in. The doctors say the post-mortem has to be completed first."
The family had visited Anwar in India and was on the way home via the train, which runs twice-weekly from New Delhi to Lahore.
A doctor said that verification could take time because of the severity of the inferno that burnt two coaches of the train.
"It's very difficult to say who the victims were," said Dr Ved Gupta, head of post-mortem operations at the hospital in Panipat. "Most of the bodies were charred beyond recognition," he said.
"It is difficult to say who is who, whether they are Indians or Pakistanis. Outside the hospital more than a dozen wooden coffins lined the boundary wall of the mortuary as trucks brought slabs of ice for other bodies that were placed in bags.
Sayed Ahmed, 64, from a small village in Uttar Pradesh, said he had two relatives from Pakistan who were on the train but could not identify the burnt remains.
"They're all in body bags. I can't recognise anybody," he said.
A dozen injured people were moved to the capital New Delhi from the hospital. Other survivors were spread inside the hopsital grounds.
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