LONDON (AFP) - A death wish may have driven a man to park his car on railway tracks in southern England where a weekend express train barrelled into it, leaving seven dead and up to 150 injured, investigators said.
The train heading from London to the southwestern coastal city of Plymouth was travelling at 160 kilometres (100 miles) an hour when it slammed into the car at a level crossing at Ufton Nervet, near Reading, on Saturday.
Half of the 300 passengers suffered minor injuries, and 70 were sent to hospital after the crash, which derailed the eight-car train, hurtled mangled hunks of metal into neighbouring fields and crumpled the car like a tin can.
Six people including two young girls died in the crash, and a seventh person died of injuries at the hospital Sunday.
An off-duty police officer saw the car, a Mazda hatchback, on the track as the barriers at the level crossing came down, but was too late to stop the oncoming disaster.
According to his statement to investigators, he frantically tried to telephone a warning to an emergency number but was too late, and watched the train smash the car.
Deputy Chief Constable Andy Trotter of the British Transport Police, asked about the likelihood it was a suicide, said: "It is one of the lines of investigation we are following -- the actions of the car driver, the evidence of the police officer."
"Obviously we will take into consideration the evidence of the police officer, seeing a motor vehicle on the crossing and making no attempt to leave."
"We haven`t closed our minds to other explanations" besides suicide, he stressed.
Trotter described the crash area, where work crews were removing wreckage and forensic investigators were examining evidence, as "a particularly shocking scene".
"There is incredible devastation, the damage to the train, the damage to the tracks. I think it is a most shocking sight."
The seven people dead from the accident were named Monday as the nine-year-old girl and her mother from the Berkshire region, a 14-year-old girl, two adult men, the 54-year-old train driver, and the car driver, a 48-year-old man from nearby Reading.
FirstGroup, which runs First Great Western trains, said in a statement it would be doing everything possible to minimize disruption to passengers. Reports said the line could be shut for up to a week.
Queen Elizabeth II released a message of condolence on Sunday, saying she was "shocked and saddened" to learn of the crash.
It was the worst disaster on Britain`s privatised rail network since May 2002 when seven people were killed when a passenger train derailed at Potters Bar, north of London.
It followed the release of a Health and Safety Executive report identifying the 8,000-odd level crossings throughout Britain as the greatest source of "catastrophic risk" for the country`s railways.
Transport Minister Alastair Darling, who travelled to the crash site Monday, said the government would listen to proposals to improve train safety, after unions and safety advocates called for all level crossings on Britain`s high-speed train lines to be removed.
"Every year we try to make this railway safer and safer and actually, notwithstanding what is a terrible accident, if you look at the past period, safety has been improving," Darling told BBC radio.
The crash is the latest in a string of rail accidents in Britain in recent years.
Britain`s all-time worst train crash was in May 1915 when a wooden troop train and a passenger train collided at Gretna Green between England and Scotland, killing 227 people.
11/08/2004 - 18:12 GMT - AFP