China rebounds from train crash that killed 70, says speed to blame for collision

China rebounded quickly from its deadliest train accident in a decade, announcing that speeding was to blame for the collision that killed at least 70 people and reopening the railway after little more than a day.

Officials wanted to appear in command Tuesday, sacking a third railway official while detailing their success in caring for the 416 people who were hurt in Monday's pre-dawn crash. To maintain its tight control over media coverage of the accident, authorities repeatedly blocked foreign journalists from speaking to survivors.

A train headed from Beijing to the coastal city of Qingdao was traveling at 131 kilometers per hour (81 mph) before the accident — well over the track section's speed limit of 80 kph (50 mph), the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing an investigative panel set up by the State Council, China's Cabinet.

The train jumped its tracks and collided with an oncoming train on another track. Nine carriages from the first train tumbled into a dirt ditch next to a farm field in Zibo, a dusty city in eastern China's Shandong province.

The second train, on its way from Yantai in Shandong province to Xuzhou in neighboring Jiangsu province, stayed upright but was knocked askew on the tracks.

Hundreds of workers labored overnight to clear the site and restore service. By Tuesday morning, little more than 24 hours after the deadly collision, a crane lifted the last remaining carriage at the scene onto a flatbed truck while trains chugged by slowly on the newly repaired track.

Those injured in the crash, many of whom had been sleeping at the time of the collision, were scattered at hospitals throughout the region. They included 70 people in critical condition as well as four French nationals who were being flown to Beijing on a special flight arranged by the French Embassy, Xinhua reported.

Local officials in Zibo held a news conference Tuesday where they gave a glowing evaluation of the emergency response, praising rescuers who rushed to the accident site and a doctor who worked more than 30 hours without rest.

Liu Xinsheng, deputy secretary-general of the Zibo city government, said the local government was covering all medical expenses of the injured for the time being.

Liu and other officials at the news conference refused to take questions and did not provide any new information on the cause of the crash or other developments.

Independent accounts of the crash were difficult to obtain. Police officers and uniformed security were posted outside some hospital rooms and patient wards, preventing reporters from entering.

Several survivors seemed afraid of getting in trouble with hospital officials, saying they would not agree to interviews unless it was approved by doctors.

The overall mood in the hospitals seemed mostly peaceful, with little indication that victims or their families were unsatisfied with the authorities' response.

Xinhua announced late Tuesday that a deputy director of the railway bureau in Jinan, the provincial capital and the nearest major city, had been dismissed. Guo Jiguang's firing follows the dismissals of the bureau's director and Communist Party secretary. All three could face investigations by the Ministry of Railways.

State media has not said whether the engineers of the trains had survived and if they were being held as part of the investigation.