At least 120 people were killed and scores injured in Pakistan on Wednesday when a passenger train crashed into another at a station and a third train then plowed into the wreckage, police said.

As police and rescuers searched for survivors and bodies among the mangled remains of carriages, a police commander said the toll from the pre-dawn disaster could rise and a senior railway official said human error was to blame.

"I was sleeping. I woke up at the noise of a huge bang and then there was big jerk and smoke all over the place," said a distraught injured passenger, Mohammad Amin.

"There was total darkness ... I hit the floor and fainted," said Amin who was desperately searching for a son.

An express train coming from the eastern city of Lahore rammed into the rear of the Quetta Express stopped at Ghotki station for repairs, police said.

A third train, coming the other way, from Karachi, then plowed into some of the derailed carriages, police said.

Ghotki, a small town in southern Sindh province, is 430 km (270 miles) northeast of Karachi.

A Reuters photographer said he saw about 50 blood-soaked bodies lying near the scene of the crash while many injured were being treated nearby.

Police said they had recovered 120 bodies and more were in the wreckage.

"I just can't give an exact death toll because a number of bodies are still in the wreckage but it is between 120 and 150," Ghotki police chief Agha Mohammad Tahir told Reuters.

"It is a very severe accident."

Nineteen carriages were derailed in all.

President Pervez Musharraf had ordered an inquiry, media reported, but Pakistan Railways officials ruled out a technical fault, instead pointing the finger of blame at the driver of the train that rammed the stationary one.

"NEGLIGENCE"

"What we know is it was not a technical error but the accident occurred because of human error," Pakistan Railways general manager Abdul Wahab told Geo television.

Senior railway official Junaid Qureshi agreed.

"He either ignored the red signal or he was snoozing," Qureshi told Reuters, referring to the driver, whom he said was among the dead.

Debris including luggage from the smashed compartments was scattered across a wide area as rescuers picked their way through twisted piles of metal and wood.

Passengers, some of them injured, could also be seen searching for missing friends and relatives.

"It's a disaster, very clearly the result of negligence," said provincial government spokesman Salahuddin Haider.

"How can two trains be allowed to run on the same track?" he said, referring to the trains involved in the initial crash.

"Why was one train not stopped from coming on when one train was already standing there for repairs?"

A military spokesman said troops had reached the crash site and were helping to evacuate people and get the injured to hospital. Helicopters had been called to help move the injured.

At least 122 injured people had been taken to three hospitals, the spokesman said.

In Pakistan's worst train crash, 307 people were killed and 400 injured in January 1990 when a packed passenger train smashed into a freight train, also in Sindh province.

A train crash in Punjab province killed 136 people in March 1997.

PHOTO CAPTION

View of collided Pakistani passengers trains at Ghotki, some 600 kilometers (370 miles) northeast of Karachi, Pakistan Wednesday, July 13, 2005. (AP)