Two trains collided outside the Indonesian capital Jakarta late Monday, killing at least five people, injuring dozens and prompting a major rescue effort.
First responders were still actively working at the scene late on Tuesday, with an official telling AFP that four remain trapped in the rubble.
A survivor told AFP of the terrifying moments after a long-distance train collided with the stationary passenger train she was on, trapping people inside the damaged carriages.
“I thought I was going to die,” Sausan Sarifah, 29, told AFP from her bed at RSUD Bekasi hospital, where she was admitted with a broken arm and a deep cut on one thigh.
She was returning home from work, she said, when her train stopped at Bekasi Timur station about 25 kilometers (15 miles) from Jakarta.
“Everything happened so fast, in a split second,” Sausan recounted.
“There were two announcements from the passenger train. Everyone was about to get off, and then suddenly there was the sound of the locomotive, very loud,” she said.
“There was no time to get out and everyone ended up crammed inside the train, pressed against each other. I don’t know how the person below me is getting through.”
She said she was afraid of suffocating to death in the crowd and worried that some stuck below wouldn’t make it.
“Thank God I was in charge, so I could evacuate quickly,” Sausan said.
Anne Purba, spokeswoman for rail operator KAI, told an AFP reporter shortly before 04:00 local time on Tuesday (2100 GMT Monday) that five people had been killed and that 79 people were “still in hospitals for observation”.
Ramli Prasetio, a spokesman for Jakarta’s search and rescue office, told AFP that “rescue efforts and the evacuation process are still ongoing,” and that rescuers believe four victims in an unknown condition remain in the wreckage.
According to another KAI spokesman, Franoto Wibowo, of the state-owned railway company KAI, a taxi appears to have clipped the passenger train at a level crossing, causing it to stop on the tracks, where it was hit.
At the station, chaotic scenes unfolded after the crash, with rescue workers screaming for oxygen tanks as ambulances stood nearby in a winding queue, lights flashing.
An AFP reporter at the scene witnessed people being pulled from the rubble on gurneys and loaded into waiting ambulances as hundreds of bystanders looked on, some looking shocked.
As rescue teams were working to free many more trapped in the crushed train carriages, House Deputy Speaker Sufmi Dasco Ahmad said the toll could rise.
“Judging by the evacuation process that is still in progress, it is possible that the number of victims will continue to increase,” he told reporters at the scene.
Franoto told Kompas TV that the army, the fire brigade, the national search and rescue agency and the Red Cross were assisting in the evacuation effort.
Stranded passengers
Jakarta police chief Asep Edi Suheri said the long-distance train had crashed into the last women-only carriage of the passenger train.
All the victims were on the passenger train and all 240 passengers on the other train were safely evacuated, according to Purba.
The crash caused “significant damage to several train carriages,” Jakarta’s search and rescue agency said in a statement.
“The incident caused injuries to a number of passengers and some victims were reported to have been trapped inside the carriages due to the force of the impact,” he added.
The agency said rescuers were “conducting the evacuation process for trapped victims using extrication equipment to free them from the destroyed train structures.”
Eva Chairista, 39, told AFP that she had rushed to RSUD hospital after hearing that her sister-in-law, whom she identified only as 27-year-old Fira, had been injured in the accident.
She arrived at a frantic medical triage scene.
"The doctor told us to be patient, there are many whose condition is worse than my sister-in-law’s." she said.
The last major train crash in the Southeast Asian country killed four crew members and injured about two dozen people elsewhere in West Java province in January 2024.
Transport accidents are not uncommon in Indonesia, a large archipelago country where buses, trains and even planes are often old and poorly maintained.
Sixteen people died when a passenger train collided with a minibus at a crossing in Jakarta in 2015.
