Nine people were killed and nearly 90 injured in Turkey when a high speed train collided with a locomotive and crashed into a station platform and overpass in an Ankara suburb early on Thursday.
Three engine drivers and six passengers were killed in the crash. One of the passengers died of injuries after being hospitalized while others were killed at the scene.
According to some reports, there were 206 passengers on board.
The train from Ankara to the central Turkish city of Konya collided head-on with the engine, which was checking the tracks at the capital's small Marsandiz station.
A total of three people have been detained within investigation into the crash, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said.
RECENT RAIL DISASTERS
Erdoğan's AKP government has been "developing" a network of high-speed rail links during its 16-year-old rule and the rail network has been hit by several fatal accidents in recent years. The Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) released a statement on the train crash. "People have been killed on the new railway routes that were not constructed with a good planning but with the push of greedy capitalists and Erdoğan’s orders," the statement underlined.
The Ankara to Konya high-speed route was launched in 2011 and was followed in 2014 with a high-speed link between Ankara and Istanbul.
The accident comes after another rail disaster in July this year when 24 people were killed and hundreds more injured after a train derailed in Tekirdağ province, northwest Turkey.
In March 2014, a commuter train smashed into a minibus on a railway track in the southern Turkish province of Mersin, which left 10 dead.
In January 2008, nine people were killed when a train derailed in the Kütahya region south of Istanbul.
Turkey's worst rail disaster in recent history was in July 2004 when 41 people were killed and 80 injured after a high-speed train derailed in the northwestern province of Sakarya.
