Policemen look inside the wreckage of a train coach at the site where two passenger trains collided on Dec. 14, leaving at least 37 people dead, in Mukerian town in Punjab on Dec. 15. (Photo: AFP)

MUKERIAN, Punjab (Reuters): Two passenger trains collided head-on in northern India on Dec. 14, killing at least 37 people and injuring 60, officials said.

Several coaches went off the tracks when the Jammu Tawi express crashed into a local train near Mukerian town in Punjab state at about noon, they said.

“There was chaos, people were screaming. Someone had broken a leg, others were lying near the derailed coaches with blood running down their heads,” area resident Shyam Babbar told Reuters by phone. “I saw smashed bodies in the damaged coaches. There was a woman and a small child next to her. Both were dead,” he said.

Railway Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav promised strong action against those found responsible for what he called a “brutal murder.”

“Both trains were allowed to move on the same track by two stations despite the station heads having communication links,” Yadav told reporters at the site. “I don’t consider this an accident. I consider this brutal murder.”

Other officials emphasized, however, that the cause of the latest accident on India’s railways had yet to be determined.

At least five cars were badly damaged and were lying in a heap of mangled metal and wheels, a Reuters photographer at the site said. One car had been split in two. “It sounded like a huge bomb explosion,” a woman on the express train told STAR News TV.

One engine had slid on top of the other and was pointing skywards while some coaches were upside down on the tracks, which run through green paddy fields.

A railway spokesman said rescue work was over and 27 bodies had been recovered. He said 60 people were injured and not 250 as police had reported earlier. “We are now working to restore the track,” he added.

Earlier, villagers worked with their bare hands to remove passengers from the wreckage before rescue teams arrived with metal cutters.

Clothes and luggage were strewn around the site where hundreds of villagers gathered to watch. Television pictures showed several people climbing on top of the twisted carriages, apparently trying to break their way in.

The train was carrying some Hindu pilgrims home from Vaishno Devi, a revered shrine in the mountains of Jammu and Kashmir.