Sabotage claim over Pakistani train crash

The minister responsible for Pakistan's rail network has suggested that sabotage could have caused a train to plunge into a ravine, killing at least three people.

The crash happened late on Sunday when several carriages of the Islamabad Express travelling between Rawalpindi and Lahore derailed in a hilly area near Jhelum city. Up to 40 people were injured.

Ishaq Khakwani, the railways minister, said: "It is almost confirmed now that it is an act of sabotage."

A senior security official said the track was damaged before the train passed on its run from Rawalpindi to Lahore, and that tools apparently used for the job, including spanners, were left at the scene and that the fish plates that join different rail sections were open.

Khakwani said there are "several elements" who could be involved in tampering with the rails. "It could be internal, it could be external," he said.

The minister said the suspected sabotage was in a "technically important" area. "Such a derailment in a hilly area could have caused greater loss but luckily there were not many casualties," he said.

He said the repair work was under way and rail traffic was likely to resume on Monday afternoon.

There was no claim of responsibility for the incident.

Pakistan suffered its worst train crash in a decade last July, when a train driver misinterpreted a signal and hit another train at a station.

Comments

Does light have mass?

The short answer is "no", but it is a qualified "no" because there are odd ways of interpreting the question which could justify the answer "yes". Light is composed of photons so we could ask if the photon has mass. The answer is then definitely "no": The photon is a massless particle. According to theory it has energy and momentum but no mass and this is confirmed by experiment to within strict limits. Even before it was known that light is composed of photons it was known that light carries momentum and will exert a pressure on a surface. This is not evidence that it has mass since momentum can exist without mass. [ For details see the Physics FAQ article What is the mass of the photon? ]. Sometimes people like to say that the photon does have mass because a photon has energy E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency of the photon. Energy, they say, is equivalent to mass according to Einstein's famous formula E = m

Play against Xbox360 gamer on PC in Vista

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates on Tuesday announced a cross-platform gaming service that integrates games played on cell phones, Xbox 360 consoles and the upcoming Windows Vista operating system. The "Live Anywhere" service will be available as part of Windows Vista, Microsoft's next-generation PC operating system. The consumer version is scheduled for release early next year. "It means that you have one online community," Gates said in a news conference. "This platform can really unleash developers to do amazing new things." The system would extend the company's existing Xbox Live service for the Xbox 360 console into millions of Internet-enabled PCs and cellular phones. No pricing information on the new service was announced. In recent months, Microsoft has been pushing a number of online services that it hopes will boost revenue as markets for its traditional software become increasingly saturated. The company expects to make money off s

Hackers biting Apple

Hackers are increasingly focusing on Apple's Mac OS X, and the number of newly discovered vulnerabilities has surged. Such a switch could mean big implications for Apple's user base, which has traditionally not had to concern itself too much over security. It's been an impressively quiet year so far on the PC virus and worm front, and hackers seem to be focusing their attention elsewhere. One such area is Apple's Mac OS X. Once mostly ignored by malware developers, there appears to be a growing interest in this "alternative" OS. Details Have you noticed the dearth of serious PC virus and worm threats out there lately? Well, it isn't a figment of your imagination -- according to vnunet.com, viruses are no longer the top security threat . While serious attacks are still likely to emerge, the bottom has apparently fallen out of the PC antivirus market -- just as Microsoft begins a big push into the security market. One cause of this drop-off is solidif

exinfo88

Search This Blog