India Arrests 3 Railway Workers in Train Crash That Killed 290

Indian officials on Friday arrested three railway workers in connection with a deadly train crash last month that left at least 290 people dead and once again highlighted safety problems across a vast train network that serves as an important lifeline for the poor.

India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, which is leading the criminal inquiry into the train accident in the eastern state of Odisha, said the workers were arrested on charges of endangering the safety of passengers, culpable homicide without murder, and tampering with evidence.

In a statement, the agency identified the three as a senior section engineer, a section engineer and a technician. The “investigation is continuing,” the agency said.

The Coromandel Express, which was traveling from West Bengal, crashed into a parked freight train in Odisha at a speed of 80 miles an hour, resulting in a three-way tangle with another train that was passing in the opposite direction.

The majority of the dead came from three general coaches, where India’s poorest — often laborers in search of economic opportunity — pack in shoulder to shoulder, traveling large stretches of the journey standing.

Immediately after the crash, officials said the cause was a signal failure — that the Coromandel Express, arriving at the station at full speed, had received a green signal to proceed onto a loop line that should have been blocked. Whether the cause was technical failure or human error was left to investigators.

The accident became the subject of at least two separate investigations — a criminal one by the C.B.I., and a technical one by the country’s commissioner of railway safety.

While officials have not released the findings of the railway’s technical investigation, copies leaked to Indian news outlets suggest that repeated red flags were missed. Among the irregularities were incorrect labeling of the wiring inside the signal box that had remained undetected for years, news reports said.