The Ministry of Railways on Tuesday ordered its local bureaus to investigate a brawl that resulted in the death of a passenger on a train from Shenzhen, Guangdong Province to Hefei, Anhui Province, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
Police have detained the head of the train crew and a rail worker involved in the brawl and carried out an autopsy on the victim, according to Xinhua.
Three off-duty railway workers boarded train K256 at Longnan Station in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province, and later quarreled and fought with on-duty train staff members around 10:45 pm, Sunday over a seat that resulted in one off-duty worker's death, the report said.
Jiangxi TV station first reported the case after some train passengers who got off the train around noon Monday in provincial capital Nanchang contacted it to say a fight had broken out between passengers and staff members.
The passengers showed the TV station a piece of paper with 20 witnesses' signatures and fingerprints condemning train staff members for beating a passenger.
A witness surnamed Lai told the station that the middle-aged man who was confirmed to have died as a result of the fight had been trying to break up the argument between one of his co-workers and the train staff.
"There are three train staff members who beat him: one in the conductor's uniform, one in a blue uniform and another one selling beverages on the train," she said.
"When the first two fought with the man, the third one just rushed to the 15th carriage from the 14th and grabbed the man's neck and beat him from one end of the carriage to the other."
"They were vicious, and the staff member not only grabbed his neck, but also punched his head," a woman surnamed Qiu said, adding she suffered a swollen left foot because she was seated next to the people involved in the brawl.
After the attack, the man was left on a seat and unable to move, witnesses said. When the train arrived at the Ganzhou Station, the man was taken off, and they did not know what happened to him later.
The Ganzhou Emergency Center confirmed that it received emergency calls and sent out an ambulance around midnight to the railway station, but medical workers found the man already dead, according to a report of the Beijing-based Caixin Media on Tuesday.
The dead man was from Xinyu, Jiangxi Province and worked in a cleaning company under the Nanchang railway bureau, the Caixin Media report said. The ministry ordered two subordinate bureaus in Jiangxi Province and Shanghai Municipality to launch a thorough investigation into the death and severely punish those responsible in accordance with the law, the Xinhua report said.