The Jalandhar-Amritsar express was hurtling at 90 kilometers (55 miles) per hour when it hit scores of people who had gathered on the tracks late Friday to get a view of a firework-packed effigy of the demon king Ravana for a Hindu festival.

Many of the victims were dismembered beyond recognition and police said it would take several days to complete the identification of the dead.

Some desperate families went from hospital to hospital in the northern city of Amritsar on Saturday looking for missing relatives, while the first funerals of some victims were held.

Hardeep Singh, chief medical officer for Amritsar, told AFP 59 deaths had been confirmed and 90 people had been injured, with seven in critical condition.

Singh said only 25 bodies had been identified so far. Amritsar’s main hospital did not have enough space in its morgue, and some corpses were laid outside.

The disaster led to new demands for safety reforms to India’s accident-plagued railway system, which records thousands of deaths each year.

Sporadic protests broke out near the accident site, with scores of protesters calling for action against the local authorities and the train driver who was questioned by police on Saturday.

But federal junior minister for Indian Railways ruled out any punitive action against his staff, including the driver, saying the national carrier was not at fault.

“There was no lapse on our part and no action against the driver will be initiated,” Manoj Sinha told reporters in New Delhi, adding “trains travel in speed only”.

Train not heard

Police moved the protesters off the tracks and brought in reinforcements to control a crowd of hundreds that gathered around the scene of the disaster.

Investigators said victims did not hear the train because the drone of the locomotive was drowned out by firecrackers. Another train had narrowly missed the crowds two minutes earlier, officials said.

According to media reports, the driver told police he did not see the revellers until the last second because he had come around a bend in the dark into the firework smoke.

As the blame game spread, police said they had given permission for the display for the annual Dussehra festival fireworks but that organisers did not have approval from the city, health department and fire brigade.

According to media reports the organisers, members of the ruling Congress party, had gone into hiding.

Federal Railway minister Piyush Goyal returned early from a trip to the United States to go to Amritsar on Saturday.

Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh called off a trip to Israel and rushed to visit the injured in hospital, where he ordered a magisterial inquiry into the incident.

India’s huge railway network is notorious for accidents, including scores who die while crossing the tracks illegally or falling off over-capacity trains.

A 2012 government report described the loss of 15,000 passengers to rail accidents every year in India as a “massacre”. The government has pledged $137 billion over five years to modernise the crumbling network.

In 1981, seven carriages from a train fell into a river as it crossed a bridge in the eastern state of Bihar, killing between 800 and 1,000 people.

But nearly every month there are accidents involving trains that derail or hit vehicles on crossings. In April, 13 children were killed when a train hit their school bus. In November 2016, the Patna-Indore express derailed in Uttar Pradesh state in the middle of the night, killing 139 people.

Riyadh had to be held to account for the death of Khashoggi and the imprisonment of other journalists, Christophe Deloire, Secretary General of the Paris-based media rights watchdog tweeted.

“Any attempt to get rid of the pressure on Saudi Arabia and to accept a compromise policy would result in giving a ‘license to kill’ to a Kingdom that puts in jail, lashes, kidnaps and even kills journalists who dare to investigate and launch debates,” he wrote.

“After the recognition of Khashoggi’s death, we expect a determined, constant and powerful pressure to be kept on Saudi Arabia in order to get the whole truth on the case and the release of Saudi Arabian journalists (who have) been condemned to crazy and horrible sentences,” he added.

After earlier denials, Saudi Arabia admitted earlier Saturday that Khashoggi, an insider turned critic of the regime, had been killed inside its Istanbul consulate in what it described as a “brawl”.

His disappearance has been shrouded in mystery and tipped Saudi Arabia into one of its worst international crises.

Turkish reports have accused Riyadh of carrying out a state-sponsored killing and dismembering the body.

Khashoggi, a contributor to the Washington Post newspaper, had been living in the United States since 2017.

On Friday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for a “prompt, thorough and transparent investigation” into Khashoggi’s death.

At least 30 people have been taken to a trauma hospital run by the Italian NGO Emergency, including a dead child, the organisation said on Twitter, hours after the Taliban warned voters to boycott the ballot “to protect their lives”.

Afghan officials confirmed there have been casualties but would not provide a number.

An AFP correspondent saw voters fleeing a polling centre in the north of the Afghan capital following a blast that a witness said had caused a number of casualties.

Deadly violence has marred the shambolic preparations for the parliamentary election that is more than three years late, with hundreds killed or wounded.

The latest bombings are likely to scare off voters, hurting turn out and the credibility of the election.

Missing voter registration lists and hiccups with biometric voter verification devices — which are being used for the first time — already have caused lengthy delays at polling centres across the country, voters and candidates complained.

Most polling centres opened late after teachers employed to handle the voting process failed to show up on time, said the Independent Election Commission (IEC), which has promised to extend voting hours.

“I came here early to finish and go home quickly, but we have been waiting for an hour and they have not started yet,” Mustafa, 42, told AFP outside a mosque in Kabul.

“The queue is getting longer. They have to register our votes quickly — we are afraid a bomber or a blast may hit us.”

Many polling centres in the heavily Shiite neighbourhoods of Kabul remained closed, a top government official told broadcaster Tolo News.

“I have been waiting for two and a half hours and the IEC officials say they have not received the voter (registration) list yet,” said Mohammad Mohaqiq, a deputy to Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah.

Abdullah — Afghanistan’s equivalent of prime minister — also waited for around half an hour at a polling centre as election workers searched for his name on a list.

IEC chief Abdul Badi Sayyad later apologised for the delays.

Almost nine million people have registered to vote in the parliamentary election, which is more than three years late.

The killing of a powerful police chief in a highly secure compound in the southern province of Kandahar on Thursday has eroded confidence in the ability of security forces to protect polling locations.

Voting in Kandahar has been delayed by a week following the attack, which killed three people, including General Abdul Raziq.

As voting got under way Saturday, three rockets were fired into the northern city of Kunduz, a police spokesman said. No casualties were reported.

There also were numerous reports of bomb explosions near polling stations in several provinces.

Despite the risks, President Ashraf Ghani urged “every Aghan, young and old, women and men” to exercise their right to vote, after casting his ballot in Kabul.

Photos posted on social media showed scores of men and women clutching their identification documents purportedly lining up outside voting centres across the country amid a heavy security presence.

A woman dressed in a burqa leaving a polling centre in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif told AFP she had been worried about “security incidents”, but decided to vote anyway.

“We have to defy the violence,” Hafiza, 57, said. “In previous years we were not happy with the elections, our votes were sold out.”

The IEC, which has been skewered over the chaotic lead-up to the ballot, on Friday urged Afghans to “vote only once” and called on others not to interfere in the process.

Taliban threats

The Taliban issued several warnings in the days leading up to the poll, calling on candidates to withdraw from the race and for voters to stay home.

At least 10 candidates out of more than 2,500 contesting the lower-house election have been killed.

Most of those standing are political novices, and include doctors, mullahs and journalists. Those with the deepest pockets are expected to win.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, which has spearheaded international efforts to keep Afghan organisers on track, on Friday called on voters to “exercise their constitutional right to vote”.

The poll is seen as a crucial test for next year’s presidential election and an important milestone ahead of a UN meeting in Geneva in November where Afghanistan is under pressure to show progress on “democratic processes”.

But there are concerns the results could be thrown into turmoil if the biometric verification devices are broken, lost or destroyed.

Votes cast without the controversial machines will not be counted, the IEC has said.

The march on parliament is set to be a noisy and festive affair uniting tens of thousands in the seemingly hopeless task of convincing Prime Minister Theresa May to hold a second Brexit referendum.

Even dogs are coming.

Organisers of the so-called People’s Vote March are asking people to dress up their favourite pets in costumes so that they could bark along the scenic route through the historic heart of London.

The message itself will be serious: the Brexit its supporters promised ahead of the June 2016 referendum that set the divorce in motion looks nothing like the one being negotiated today.

Campaigners say they would have voted differently had they known the true costs involved.

“It’s time the great silent and not-so-silent majority made their feelings known about Brexit,” anti-Brexit activist Gina Miller wrote in The Independent newspaper.

“We must shout with one voice: ‘Not in my name!'”

The pro-EU newspaper’s online petition demanding a binding vote on any deal agreed before the March deadline has been signed nearly a million times.

Divided nation

The British premier has made it abundantly clear that she has no intention of allowing a do-over.

“They now want a second referendum to go back to the British people and say ‘Oh, we’re terribly sorry — we think you’ve got it wrong,'” May told parliament on Wednesday.

“There’ll be no second referendum. The people voted and this government will deliver on it.”

Yet what May’s government is actually delivering is not entirely clear.

The alternatives facing Britain at the moment range between a clean break without any agreement and one in which little changes except for London losing its voice in the EU.

Neither choice is appealing. Recriminations over how Britain got here are leaving May looking increasingly isolated and weak.

And EU leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron are openly wondering if a second British vote might yet make the mess go away.

Polls show support for a second referendum evenly split — the same as with Brexit itself.

The 2016 referendum was backed by 52 percent of voters on turnout of 72 percent.

But some think MPs may rally around the idea once they see what Britain might be forced to sign up to — and they must approve — at the last moment to avert complete chaos.

The last big march on parliament demanding a second vote in June saw an estimated 100,000 gather on and around the picturesque Parliament Square facing Westminster Palace.

Organisers say this one will be bigger and involve supporters of all major parties from every corner of Britain — and beyond.

“More than 150 coaches will bring people from towns and cities from every region and nation,” they said in a statement.

The speaker’s list is headlined by London Mayor Sadiq Khan while Gary Lineker — a retired football star familiar to just about every Briton — will pipe in a video message of support.

And groups representing several million EU citizens in the UK will unite with their British counterparts in Europe to march under a single banner from Hyde Park.

The route itself will twist from the giant park to the central Trafalgar Square before reaching parliament.

Dozens more were hurt in the accident, some of them seriously, and overwhelmed local hospitals ran out of space for the dead, forcing them to leave some bodies outside.

The disaster, near Amritsar in the north of the country on Friday, led to new demands for safety reforms to India’s accident-plagued railway system, which records thousands of deaths each year.

Reports said the train hit scores of people who had gathered on tracks to watch the burning of a firework-packed effigy of the demon king Ravana for a Hindu festival.

Police said victims did not hear the Jalandhar-Amritsar express arriving because the noise was drowned out by firecrackers.

Another train had narrowly missed the crowds two minutes earlier, officials said.

Many bodies were badly dismembered and police said identification of the victims could take several days, officials said.

Amritsar’s main hospital did not have enough space in its morgue, and some corpses were laid outside.

Hardeep Singh, chief medical officer for Amritsar, told AFP 59 deaths had been confirmed and 90 people had been injured.

Singh said only 25 bodies had been identified so far.

Media reports said there were 61 dead.

The funerals of some victims were held Saturday and the accident brought widespread demands for tough action by authorities.

Punjab state governor V.P. Singh Badnore said: “Those who need to be punished will be punished and accountability will be fixed.”

A 2012 government report described the loss of 15,000 passengers to rail accidents every year in India as a “massacre”. The government has pledged $137 billion over five years to modernise the crumbling network.

Railway minister Piyush Goyal returned early from a trip to the United States to go to Amritsar on Saturday. Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh called off a trip to Israel to go to the disaster scene.

With 53 million users, Facebook is extremely popular in Vietnam — where the internet has become a battleground for activists like Khoi.

A controversial cybersecurity bill, due to come into effect in January, will require internet companies to remove “toxic” content and hand over user data if asked by the communist government to do so.

It also requires firms to host servers in-country, which has sparked fears of further government meddling.

“Protecting freedom of expression should be an official policy of Facebook, but sadly, it’s not,” Khoi told AFP during an interview at the city’s airport.

“Facebook is the only space in Vietnam where we can talk freely, express our mind freely and we can access uncensored information, and sometimes organize the peaceful protests. That’s why the government is scared. So now they try to control Facebook,” she said.

“The crackdown is very heavy.”

Banned from selling her CDs and organising concerts, Khoi performs secret gigs away from the watchful eyes of police — and is now afraid of becoming an online target.

Facebook and Google have so far declined to comment on Vietnam’s impending cybersecurity law, though rights groups have slammed the bill.

Khoi said during Friday’s meeting with Facebook, she urged the company to prevent government supporters abusing the network’s community standards to silence dissidents.

“Facebook said they already worked on this. But in reality, in Vietnam, many independent journalists and activists have their accounts locked and the post deleted every day,” she added.

Placed under informal house arrest in late 2017 after she brandished an anti-Donald Trump sign when the US president visited last year, Khoi was also banned from running in parliamentary elections a year earlier.

“I think Facebook should do the right thing to show what they do is protecting freedom of expression,” Khoi said.