Bijoy Express derailment was avoidable: JS body

The parliamentary standing committee on railways ministry yesterday said the derailment of Bijoy Express on March 17 at Tejer Bazar in Cumilla's Nangalkot upazila could have been averted.

The committee came up with the observation after visiting the accident site  to take a first-hand experience about the accident.

ABM Fazle Karim Chowdhury, ruling Awami League lawmaker and chairman of the parliamentary watchdog, led the committee. Railways Minister and a member of the committee Zillul Hakim, and its other members Gazi Shafiqur Rahman and Nurun Nahar, were also present among others.

They spoke to several eyewitnesses, who blamed negligence of railways staffs behind the incident that saw nine compartments of the Jamalpur-bound train from Chattogram derailed, leaving several injured.

"There are respective railways staffs who are supposed to oversee the rail tracks regularly. However, I didn't see any such activities of railway staffs in my area even once a month," Md Shamsuddin, chairman of Nangalkot upazila, said before the JS committee.

Md Kamal, another eyewitness, said he saw three to four unknown youths fled the accident site leaving a bag sometimes before the accident, adding that those youths might have opened the fish plates of the rail track.

Fazle Karim said the cause of the train accident will be identified and culprits will be nabbed through investigation.