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NEYSHABUR, Iran - Runaway train cars carrying a lethal mix of fuel and chemicals derailed, caught fire and then exploded hours later Wednesday in northeast Iran, killing more than 200 people, injuring at least 400 and leaving dozens trapped beneath crumbled mud homes.
Most of those reported dead were firefighters and rescue workers who had extinguished most of the blaze outside Neyshabur, an ancient city of 170,000 people in a farming region 400 miles east of the capital, Tehran.
The dead also included top city officials - including Neyshabur's governor, mayor and fire chief as well as the head of the energy department and the director-general of the provincial railways - who had all gone to the site of the derailment, the Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
The explosion devastated five villages, where authorities rushed in blood supplies and appealed through loudspeakers for donors. Hardest hit was Hashemabad, where Zahra Rezaie, 41, whose mud home was near the tracks, was cooking lunch for her family when she heard the explosion and felt the ground shake. Then the ceiling collapsed.
"It knocked down and broke some dishes. I was sure it was an earthquake, and my first thought was to rush to the school and save my children," Rezaie said. Her children were safe.
Rescue workers, aided by cranes and giant floodlights, worked into the night shrouded in toxic fumes, as they searched for dozens of people thought to be trapped in clay homes devastated by the blast.
The blast was so powerful that windows were shattered as far as 6 miles away. In an apparent indication of the explosion's force, Iranian seismologists recorded a 3.6-magnitude tremor in the area, IRNA reported.
Many of the buildings that collapsed in a Dec.26 earthquake in Bam, in southeast Iran, also were mud-brick structures. That tragedy killed more than 41,000 people.
Authorities were investigating what caused the 51 cars to roll out of the Abu Muslim train station, outside Neyshabur, at 4 a.m. Forty-eight of the cars derailed on reaching the next stop at Khayyam, about 12 miles away, and caught fire.
Iranian TV showed footage of black plumes of smoke and orange flames billowing from the cars, 17 of which were loaded with sulfur, six with gasoline, seven with fertilizer and 10 with cotton. Dozens of people, some wearing face masks to protect themselves from the smoke, were seen putting out flames on the scene.
Firefighters had extinguished 90 percent of the fire when the cars exploded at 9:37 a.m., Mohammad Maqdouri, head of the local emergency operations headquarters, told Tehran television.
More than 400 people were injured, said Vahid Bakechi, a senior official in Khorasan Province's Emergency Headquarters.
Eighty percent of them were injured when their homes collapsed, and the rest were either burned or hurt from the force of the explosion, said Syed Majid Taqizadeh, head of the 22 Bahman hospital.