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Faulty chairs to blame for casualties in Russian train derailment

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  • Faulty chairs to blame for casualties in Russian train derailment

    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.
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