Trains Derails in Turkey, Killing at least 36 and 15 and 6

Rescue workers with sniffer dogs are sifting through wreckage after one of Turkey's new high speed trains came off the rails killing 36 people in one of the country's worst ever rail crashes.

Turkish newspapers blamed the government for Thursday evening's crash, saying it had ignored experts' safety warnings in launching the fast-train link between Istanbul, Turkey's commercial hub, and the capital Ankara barely a month ago.

"Serial murder," said the headline in the mass-circulation Hurriyet newspaper.

"High speed to disaster," said the Radikal daily.

The new express train, inaugurated by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan amid much fanfare last month, was part of an extensive modernisation of Turkey's ancient, creaking rail network.

Highlighting public anger, a woman who lost her husband in the crash screamed, "This train should not have been running" at Erdogan when he visited the site of the crash overnight.

Several newspapers republished pictures of Erdogan in a railway guard's cap seeing off the first train on June 4.

Officials say the accident was probably caused by a mechanical fault. But Turkish media also focused on the dilapidated state of the rail network, saying the track in question was more than 100 years old.

Passengers were quoted as saying the train was travelling very fast at the time of the accident, much more than the 75-80 kph cited by officials on Thursday night.

A Turkish passenger train hit a bus on Sunday, killing 15 people on board, the state-run Anatolian news agency said. The crash in western Turkey comes just three days after a recently inaugurated high-speed train between Istanbul and Ankara came off the rails, killing 37 people and injuring 81.

Thursday's train crash sparked public anger against the government and calls for the resignation of the transportation minister and managers of the state railways company.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan angrily rejected the calls, but the crash has deeply embarrassed his government, which inaugurated the new rail link recently in a blaze of publicity.

Two trains collided head-on in northwestern Turkey on Wednesday, killing four people, injuring at least 19 and trapping passengers in a crushed train car, television reported.

Firefighters were trying to enter the first car of one of the trains to pull out passengers. The car was smashed and flipped over in the collision near the village of Tavsancil in Kocaeli province.

Private NTV television, citing officials, put the casualty toll at four dead and 19 injured.