Three dead in Italy train crash

Rome - A passenger train and a goods train collided on the Italian island of Sardinia on Friday killing three people, including a British tourist, and injuring half-a-dozen more, police said.

The head-on collision occurred on a single line track between the towns of Bitori and Bortilagi in the centre of the island, an officer of the carabinieri paramilitary police at the scene told AFP.

The crash killed the driver of the passenger train, a 28-year-old British woman named by police and diplomatic sources as Elizabeth Anna Kathryn Beever, and another passenger, Captain Davide Egidi said in a telephone interview.

One of the five or six injured was in critical condition in intensive care, he added.

Ansa news agency said there were two critically injured.

Rescuers had not immediately retrieved the body of the dead driver which was stuck in the wreckage, Egide said, but all the other occupants had been evacuated.

Egidi said a "communications error" was believed to have caused the crash and neither train knew the other was on the line.

Media reports said investigators believed the goods train ignored an order to stop in Bortigali.

The regional train line, constructed in the 19th century, runs between the Sardinian towns of Nuoro and Macomer in an industrial zone of the mainly tourist island.

Train collisions are quite frequent in Italy where 60 per cent of lines, or 9,667 kilometres of a total 15,965 are only single-track, and the secondary network is particularly antiquated.

On April 16, several people were injured when a passenger train and a goods train hit each other in the station at Terni in the central region of Umbria.

The worst accident in recent years was on January 7, 2005 when 17 people were killed and 60 injured, in a collision between an express passenger train and a goods train near Bologna.

Agence France Presse