BURNED TO DEATH.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20620, 19 July 1930, Page 3 (Supplement)

BURNED TO DEATH.

RUSSIAN RAILWAY HORROR.

FORTY-FIVE FATALITIES. The facta of a hideous railway accident in Russia in which 45 persons were burned to death and 23 seriously injured while they were trapped in a moving train, were recently revealed by the arrest of pleven officials, trainmen, and members of the Russian Transport Department staff, on a charge of criminal negligence. The tragedy occurred on April 16, near the station of Domodedovo, 20 miles south of Moscow, when a passenger in an overcrowded coach dropped and broke a bottle of methylated spirit, and another passenger who was smoking dropped a lighted match. The coach was almost immediately in flames and the occupants were trapped like rats by luggage piled in the aisles before the doors. Before the train guards, attracted by the screams of the panic-stricken passengers, had succeeded in stopping the train, most of the occupants of the coach had been burned, suffocated, or trampled to death. Peasants who wero passengers in the other coaches succeeded in preventing the flames from spreading, and rendered first aid to the injured. The arrested men include the Moscow station-master and his assistant, who are accused of habitually permitting dangerous overcrowding of coaches with passengers and luggage.