SOME people walking past held their hands over their mouths, few glancing at the huge mound of corpses in body bags beside the tracks. The ground was littered with discarded possessions: tattered clothing, pots, identity cards, Bibles and rosary beads.
Aid workers in Kisangani are still trying to come to terms with the horrific scenes they witnessed when a train carrying Rwandan refugees from the jungle arrived at its terminus beside the Zaire River on Sunday evening. After the goods wagons carrying more than 3,000 people had disgorged their human cargo, 91 passengers were found dead and 47 injured, some of them seriously.
"Some of the bodies had already gone stiff", Mr Andy Bastable of OXFAM said. "There were men, women and children dead in the carriages. Some of the refugees were grieving over the bodies but most just seemed numb. When we'd unloaded the dead, people were just walking over the corpses on the ground.
It was just by chance that a group of aid workers was at the terminus when the train pulled in. Having spent the day at Biaro refugee camp deep in the jungle, they were waiting by the river for the ferry to take them back to Kisangani. Among them was a German doctor who had been treating ill and wounded refugees at the" camp, 25 miles south of the town.
"The train was totally over crowded," Dr Assam Hanano of the Cap Anamur agency said. "The people were so tightly packed they couldn't breathe. They died of asphyxiation and dehydration. I was able to save a few lives but for some of the injured it was too late: they just died by the tracks."
The UN agencies in charge of the evacuation of some 80,000 Rwandan refugees from the Zairean rainforest are still trying to establish who is responsible for the tragedy. The refugees are being transported by rail to Kisangani and from there by trucks to a transit camp on the outskirts of the town, before being airlifted back to Rwanda. The operation is being run by the UN in conjunction with the rebel movement which now controls more than three quarters of Zaire.
"We'd appealed to the [rebel] alliance not to run a train that day because our transit camp was already over full," Mr Paul Stromberg of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said. "But the train was loaded and set off without an OK from us. We don't know if it was the alliance which gave the order or if it was simply a matter of the rail company deciding to take another load."
Every day scores of refugees are dying from disease and from wounds they received two weeks ago when they were attacked by local villagers and Zairean rebels" armed with automatic weapons. Desperate to escape the camp, the refugees crowded onto the train on Sunday afternoon, some of them hauling themselves into the carriages as they rolled past. According to one rumour, they had heard it was the last train out of the camp.
"Even through my telephoto lens I couldn't see any gaps in the sea of faces in the wagons," a photographer, Stephen Ferry, who travelled on the train engine, said. "The people were obviously dead standing up. It was only when the train emptied that the dead fell to the ground."