Two trains including an inter-city express crashed head-on in western Turkey on Wednesday, killing at least four people and injuring 70 more, Transport Minister Binali Yildirim said.

The trains ploughed into each other in the late afternoon near Tavsancil in northwestern Turkey, around 60 km (40 miles) from Istanbul and not far from the spot where 39 people died last month when a new, super express train came off the rails.

There was conflicting information on the toll. Salih Gun, a local member of parliament, told Reuters nine people had been killed. Yildirim said it was not clear if there were more corpses inside the wreckage. “Four passengers have died and around 70 were injured and taken to hospitals, which are still treating 22 injured passengers,” Yildirim told a news conference in the town of Gebze near the crash site. “After the rescue work it will become clear if there are more dead in the damaged carriages,” he said.

Police, troops and ambulance workers clambered over crumpled carriages and used power tools to try to free survivors. Some passengers sat by the track holding bandages to head wounds. Military police earlier put the death toll at six and said 100 people were injured. One of the trains was an express from Ankara to Istanbul and the other was travelling from Istanbul to the town of Adapazari. Anatolian said 171 passengers and nine staff were on the express train. Numbers on the other train were unclear.

A highway official told Reuters the Istanbul-Adapazari train suffered the worst of the head-on crash, with four of its carriages damaged and one lying on its side. One of the carriages in the Ankara-Istanbul train was damaged. Witnesses speaking on Turkish television said there were many casualties in the front carriages of both trains.

Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu, visiting the scene of the crash, said all the injured had been rescued and taken to hospital. A senior Transport Ministry official said it appeared one of the trains had run through a red light. Thirty-nine people were killed less than three weeks ago when a super express train from Ankara to Istanbul crashed on the same line. That service, suspended since the crash, was inaugurated in early June in a blaze of publicity as a rapid new link between the political capital and Turkey’s economic hub – part of an extensive upgrade of Turkey’s ramshackle rail network.

<B>Mehmet Emin Caliskan</B>