Iran Train Inferno Toll Over 300

The confirmed death toll from the horrifying explosion of a runway train and its cargo in Iran has now risen to at least 309, with another 460 people injured.

Many of the known dead are fire and rescue workers caught in the explosion, which came several hours after the train cars derailed and caught fire. Officials in the city of Neyshabur, including the local governor, mayor and fire chief were among those killed.

Thursday, as funeral services were held for the governor, residents in less exalted walks of life are scanning publicly posted lists of the dead - looking for, and hoping not to find, the names of relatives and friends.

The explosion of the runaway train and its cargo of fuel and chemicals devastated five villages on Wednesday and left a crater about fifty feet deep.

Firefighters battled freezing temperatures and toxic fumes overnight, finally extinguishing the blaze shortly after dawn on Thursday.

The blast threw people's limbs hundreds of meters away from the railway tracks.

For miles around, fumes from what had been the cargo of the derailed train - sulfur, oil, fertilizers and cotton - made it almost impossible to breathe.

Dozens of people are believed to be trapped in their homes of mud and clay near the train tracks, according to Vahid Barakchi, a senior official in Khorasan Province's Emergency Headquarters.

"The scale of the devastation is very great, and the damage appears to be more than initially thought," said Barakchi.

In the village of Dehnow, which is closest to the blast, nearly all of the 150 inhabitants were killed, said Mohammad Tazegi, 17, one of the few survivors.

The village, about 550 yards from the blast, was flattened as if hit by an earthquake.

Many local people found the explosion outside Neyshabur, an ancient city 400 miles east of the capital, to be so powerful that they thought it was an earthquake. Windows as far as six miles away were shattered.

Iranian seismologists recorded a 3.6-magnitude tremor at the exact time of the blast, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported, in what was an apparent indication of the force of the explosion.

"The entire area around me shook," said Hussein Hassani, who saw the blast from several miles away. "It felt like a strong earthquake, but because the buildings didn't collapse (where I was) I knew it wasn't. Smoke could be seen ... for hours."

Iranian TV showed the burning rail cars and clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky. Seventeen of the rail cars had been loaded with sulfur, six with gasoline, seven with fertilizer and 10 with cotton. Some firefighters wore face masks to protect themselves from the fumes.

An investigation has begun to find out what caused the 51-car-long freight train to roll out of the Abu Muslim train station at 4 a.m. Wednesday. All but 3 of the cars derailed on reaching the next stop at Khayyam, about 12 miles away, and caught fire.

IRNA reported that "some vibrations" had set the cars in motion.

The three hardest hit villages were within 600 square yards of the blast.

Eighty percent of the casualties came when houses collapsed in the village of Hashemabad. The remaining injured were either burned or hurt by the force of the explosion, said Syed Majid Taqizadeh, head of the 22 Bahman hospital.

The editor of the local newspaper Sobh-e-Neyshabur, Saeed Kaviani, told the AP that dozens of people remain buried under the rubble of their homes in the villages.

Neyshabur resident Zahra Rezaie, 41, was cooking lunch for her family when she heard the explosion and felt the ground shake. After finding her children safe at the school, Rezaie went to a local hospital.

"That's when I saw them bringing in many injured people ... wearing uniforms that firefighters or rescue workers wear," she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

In New York, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan conveyed his condolences to the Iranian government and the victims of the disaster, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said. He added that the world body was ready to assist those affected by the tragedy.

Neyshabur is at the center of a farming region for cotton, fruit and grain.

It became one of Persia's foremost cities in the 400 A.D., a center of culture with several important colleges.

By Ali Akbar Dareini