The collision between a commuter train and a long-distance train happened late on Monday in Bekasi, just outside Jakarta.
Bobby Rasyidi, chief executive of Indonesia’s state railway firm PT KAI, said the death toll had risen to 14 and that evacuation work was still ongoing.
Mohammad Syafii, the head of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, told a press conference early on Tuesday that it was a delicate process to rescue survivors from the mangled carriages.
“We needed to involve personnel with certain skills to perform a measured extrication,” he said. “There are some victims who are alive to this minute and we’re hoping to extricate them, but they’re still pinned by the train material.”
One survivor told of the moments after a long-distance train slammed into the stationary commuter train she was in, trapping people inside mangled carriages.
“I thought I was going to die,” Sausan Sarifah, 29, said from her bed at the RSUD Bekasi hospital, where she was admitted with a broken arm and a deep cut to one thigh.
She was on her way home from work, she said, when her train stopped at the Bekasi Timur station about 25km (15 miles) from Jakarta.“It all happened so fast, in a split second,” Sausan said.
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“There was no time to get out, and everyone ended up piled up inside the train, crushed on top of one another. I don’t know how the person underneath me is doing.”
She said she had feared suffocating to death in the human pile-up, and worried that some pinned underneath did not survive.
“Thank God I was on top, so I could be evacuated quickly,” Sausan said.
According to Franoto Wibowo, a spokesperson for rail operator KAI, a taxi appeared to have clipped the commuter train on a level crossing, causing it to come to a standstill on the tracks, where it was hit.
At the station, chaotic scenes unfolded in the aftermath of the crash, with rescue workers shouting for oxygen tanks as ambulances stood by in a snaking queue, lights flashing.
A dense scene of people as medical staff and rescue workers prepare on a rail platform next to the collision site
An AFP reporter at the scene witnessed people being carried out of the wreckage on gurneys and loaded into waiting ambulances as hundreds of bystanders looked on, some seemingly in shock.
As rescuers worked to free many more trapped in the crushed train carriages, an Indonesian deputy house speaker, Sufmi Dasco Ahmad, said at the scene that the toll could continue to rise.
Franoto told Kompas TV the military, fire brigade, national search and rescue agency and Red Cross were aiding in the evacuation effort.
Jakarta’s police chief, Asep Edi Suheri, said the long-distance train had crashed into the last, women-only, carriage of the commuter train.
All the victims were in the commuter train, and all of about 240 passengers on the other train had been evacuated safely, according to Purba.
Rescuers were “carrying out the evacuation process for the trapped victims using extrication equipment to free them from the wrecked train structures”, the Jakarta search and rescue agency said.The collision caused “significant damage to several train carriages”, it said.
Eva Chairista, 39, said she had rushed to the RSUD hospital after hearing that her sister-in-law, who she named only as 27-year-old Fira, had been injured in the crash.
She arrived to a frenetic scene of medical triage. “The doctor told us to be patient, there are many whose condition is worse than my sister-in-law’s,” she said.
The last major train crash in the south-east Asian country killed four crew members and injured about two dozen people elsewhere in West Java province in January 2024.