Indonesia Train Crash Kills at Least 3, Official Says

Nearly 500 passengers were evacuated on Friday morning after two trains collided on the edge of a rice field near the Indonesian city of Bandung, killing at least three people and injuring more than two dozen others, officials said.

The accident occurred just after dawn in Rancaekek District, east of the city on the island of Java. Footage from the scene showed mangled train carriages, including at least two that had gone off the rails and into a flooded rice field.

One train was a local commuter line, and the other was heading west to Bandung from the city of Surabaya when the crash occurred, officials said. Bandung is around 100 miles by road southeast of Jakarta, the capital.

Bandung’s police commissioner, Kusworo Wibowo, said in a televised interview that three crew members had died.

Bey Machmudin, the acting governor of West Java, told reporters that all of the passengers — an estimated 191 on the commuter train and 287 on the long-distance one — had been evacuated. But Mr. Bey said that information on casualties was preliminary.

Railway safety is a major concern in Indonesia even though the number of major train accidents there has been falling in recent years, according to a 2021 study by Hardianto Iridiastadi, a Bandung-based expert on transportation safety.

There were 35 train accidents nationwide between 2010 and 2016, and they were linked to 55 deaths and injuries to more than 240 passengers, the study said. More than a quarter of those accidents were train collisions; the others were derailments or other incidents.