There was growing public anger in China in the wake of a major rail crash at the weekend after a video appeared to show bodies tumbling out of wrecked train carriages as officials hurried to clear up the scene of the disaster.


On Sunday, less than a day after two bullet trains collided in the south of the country, killing at least 43 people and injuring a further 210, eight mechanical diggers began to dig trenches to bury two twisted and broken train carriages.

The crash occurred on Saturday night after a bolt of lightning hit one bullet train, causing it to lose power and grind to a halt. A second train then hit it from behind, causing six carriages to derail and two to fall off the side of the elevated tracks.

Locals immediately accused the government of trying to cover up the disaster and questioned how a full investigation could be carried out without an inspection of the wreckage.

A video then emerged which appeared to show at least two bodies falling out of the carriages as they were being moved. The video has now been watched over 1.2 million times in less than a day.

The first body appears to fall to the ground from a height of some 60ft as a carriage is pulled off the elevated train tracks by a crane.

A scream can be heard in the background. The second body seems to fall out of a train window as a mechanical digger rolls a carriage into a ditch.

An online poll of more than 44,000 people showed that 97 per cent were unhappy with the government's response to the disaster, the first major tragedy on its much-vaunted high-speed rail network.

Only a few hundred people supported the Communist party, while 93 per cent said the party's management was "extremely poor, showing a total disregard for human life" and a further four per cent said they were "very dissatisfied".

One popular comment circulating around the Chinese internet said: "When a country is corrupt to the point that a single lightning strike can cause a train crash [...] none of us is exempt. China today is a train travelling through a lightning storm. We are not spectators; all of us are passengers."

Chinese officials have instructed the media not to sensationalise the accident, and fresh instructions sent to reporters yesterday said: "Do not report the accident too frequently. Report moving stories about people donating blood or taxi drivers not taking fares from victims. Do not investigate the cause of the accident."

The instructions added: "The name of the Wenzhou accident will be 'The 23 July Wenzhou Line Railway Accident'. From now on, use the headline: 'Great Love in the Face of Great Tragedy'. On television, provide the relevant information, but be careful of the music used."

The Global Times, a government-run newspaper, said the crash would be a "bloody lesson" for China's "entire railway industry" and should be a "starting point for safer railway standards". However, it urged the public "to make rational judgements".

Three senior rail officials have been fired in the wake of the crash, including the head of the Shanghai railway bureau. A spokesman for China's Railways ministry, Wang Yongping, also held a press conference in which he reaffirmed China's "confidence" in its high speed rail network, which was, until the crash, a beacon of the country's technological ambitions.

Mr Wang was shouted at by reporters, however, after he fielded questions on a four-year-old girl who was found alive in the wreckage at 4pm on Sunday, at least six hours after a formal announcement that all the bodies in the carriages had been removed. Mr Wang said the discovery was a "miracle".