Train crash survivors tell of final moments

TANGERANG (JP): Most of the passengers injured in Monday's fatal head-on train collision on the Jakarta-Merak line have been allowed by doctors to leave hospital.

As of Friday, Tangerang General Hospital only had one crash victim left in its wards, while Asshobirin Islamic Hospital was treating eight others.

Interviewed on their hospital beds on Friday, most of them said that they would not easily forget the nightmare, in which four passengers were killed and 37 others injured.

Many said they are very grateful for God's generosity in allowing them to live, although they would have to carry scars, both physical and mental, as grim reminders of the Serpong tragedy.

The injured passengers, from both trains, recalled that they neither saw nor felt anything strange immediately preceding the 9:15 a.m. accident.

They said most of the people on the trains were regular passengers, such as small-scale traders and employees, who were about to start a busy Monday as usual.

The crash, so far as they could remember, happened suddenly.

"The only thing that I can remember was seeing several passengers, including my daughter, collapse on my right before I fell unconscious," said Ibah, 32, who was traveling with her daughter from Tangerang to Tanah Abang in Central Jakarta.

"But thank God my daughter is okay. She only got several bruises," she said.

Ibah has to undergo surgery on her abdomen to repair a bone fracture.

" The doctor said that a bone in her abdomen has broken, and that after the operation she will need at least nine months to fully recover," said Ibah's husband, Erlan, a waiter at a karaoke club in Grogol, West Jakarta.

Ibah also suffered a knock to her head, but doctors have yet to find any signs of permanent damage.

Other patients at the hospital experienced similar horrors during the accident.

Rahmat, 23, the only victim left at Tangerang General Hospital, cannot erase the memory of a man being decapitated in front of his eyes.

"It was terrible," recalled trader Rahmat, who was on his way back home from Merak to Perigi, Tangerang, with his father.

Rahmat said he had no seat for the trip and had to stand between the first and second carriages of the Merak-Jakarta train, while his father sat in the first carriage.

Seconds before the accident took place, he saw passengers sitting on the roof of the moving train jumping to the ground.

At first, he thought the passengers were attempted to escape from a brawl, which often occur on the route.

The next thing he knew, the trains collided and the man sitting in front of him was decapitated while the body remained where it was.

He said he then fell unconscious.

Rahmat received several stitches on his left ear and doctors had to discharge blood from his left lung because he was having trouble breathing.

"My right eye was injured too, but thank God it's okay. Although my eyesight is a bit disturbed," he said.

Rahmat's father, Sadam only suffered light bruises.

Another passenger on the train heading from Merak, Jackson, said he saw no guards at Serpong railway station "giving any kind of signal", as was usual, that another train was heading toward them.

"Our train stopped at Serpong station. We saw the train dispatcher talking with some of the station officers. He said that our train could just go ahead," Jackson told reporters.

"When the train was already moving at full speed, some of us could see a station officer running toward our train with a stop sign screaming something. But the train was already moving, and we didn't understand what he was screaming about then."

Separately, passengers on the other train recalled the train signaling to the other train to stop.

"When we saw the (Merak-Jakarta) train coming, we just jumped out of our train ... all of us together. Our train braked and it stopped. The train from Merak just kept coming and smashed," one passenger, who requested anonymity, said.

Both trains had at least seven compartments each. The train from Jakarta was nearly empty, while the one from Merak was packed to such an extent that many passengers were standing by the doors of the train.

Police took some 20 minutes to pull three bloody corpses, which were squeezed between sheets of crushed metal, from the wreckage.

All of the patients remaining at the two hospitals vowed not to take the train again.

"I'm more afraid of taking a train now than I am climbing trees," said patient Dulapa, 67, a farmer. (09/ylt)