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Could this be an AQ test run in Iran?

Scores Die in Iran Fuel Wagon Blast

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=2&u=/nm/20040218/ts_nm/iran_blast_dc

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Runaway train wagons laden with a lethal cocktail of fuel and fertilizers blew up in northeast Iran Wednesday, killing scores of villagers and firefighters.

Reuters Photo

Canadian Press
Slideshow: Iran Train Derails, Explodes

Estimates of the death toll ranged from 60 to more than 200, with hundreds injured. The most recent figure, from state television, put the dead at 182.

The state news agency IRNA said the 51 runaway wagons, filled with petrol, fertilizer and sulphur products had been set rolling by earth tremors in the saffron-growing province of Khorasan bordering Turkmenistan and Afghanistan (news - web sites).

Other officials said the reported tremor could have been the jolt of the blast itself, leaving less clear why the wagons had crashed in a village beside the tracks.

Iranian television showed flames licking from mangled, charred train wagons, with thick black smoke billowing into the sky. Grinning youths scampered around the wreckage.

"The number of those killed in this disaster is now more than 200," Vahid Barkchi, an emergency official in the northeastern province of Khorasan, told IRNA. "The emergency team is transferring more than 350 injured to hospitals nearby."

The disaster comes amid political uncertainty in Iran, with disputed parliamentary elections to be held Friday.

IRNA said five villages were seriously damaged in the early morning blast which state radio said had killed at least 60 people. Ambulances and rescue helicopters rushed to the scene.

Television showed overturned carriages jumbled beside the tracks, with homes just yards away.

Mangled pickup trucks littered the area and dazed onlookers stood around in one village on a dusty plain with snow-capped mountains in the distance.

EARTH SHUDDERED Fire crews had rushed to the scene to combat a smaller initial blaze when the wagons blew up in a giant explosion 13 miles from the city of Nishapur, hometown of medieval poet Omar Khayyam.

Windows were shattered for more than 10 km around and the earth could be felt shuddering up to 70 km away.

Barkchi said the dead included villagers and some of the more than 200 firefighters who had been battling the blaze.

Iran is prone to tremors and earthquakes. More than 40,000 people died in an earthquake on Dec. 26 in the ancient citadel city of Bam, some 650 km further south.

IRNA said the governor general of Nishapur was killed in the blast along with the head of the city's electricity board and the fire chief.

Interior Ministry officials said they had no immediate figure for fatalities.

In the worst rail crash of the last quarter century, at least 575 people died on June 4, 1989, when two passenger trains in Russia's Ural mountains were engulfed in an explosion from a leaking gas pipeline.