China’s State Council has blamed 54 individuals and widespread design flaws in train signaling systems for the deadly high-speed train crash in Wenzhou in July, The New York Times reported. The names in the final report on the incident issued Wednesday laid most of the blame with the former top railway minister Liu Zhijun, who was fired for corruption months before the crash, and the Deputy Chief Engineer Zhang Shuguang. The State Council report also criticized Ma Cheng, the former head of the China Railway Signal and Communication who died of a heart attack a month after the crash. The report said the individuals named would be punished. The immediate cause of the crash was a lightening strike that caused a loss of power to the signaling devices, the same cause that was cited in preliminary reports. The report did not say how it thought design flaws would affect the rest of the train system.
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