Rescued Chinese toddler may lose leg

A two-year-old girl found alive in the wreckage of a train crash in eastern China 21 hours after the high-speed collision may have to have a leg amputated, state media reported Monday.

Xiang Weiyi was travelling with her parents on Saturday when their train suddenly stopped and was ploughed into by an oncoming high-speed service that pushed four carriages off a viaduct, the China Daily reported.

The toddler, who was in the last carriage of the train, was only discovered on Sunday afternoon as workers picked through the mangled wreckage of the train.

There are fears her mother and father may be among the dead, which the railway ministry on Monday put at 36, with 192 people wounded, in the country's worst rail accident since 2008.

Doctors at the hospital treating her told the official Xinhua news agency they may have to amputate her left leg.

"We'll observe the recovery progress of her blood circulation in the left leg, and then decide whether she needs an amputation," Pan Guoquan, head of the intensive care unit at the hospital treating Xiang, was quoted as saying.

China has ordered an urgent overhaul of rail safety nationwide after Saturday's accident -- the worst disaster ever to hit the country's high-speed train network.

The accident sparked public outcry in China, where thousands of postings on Weibo, a popular Twitter-like service, said emergency workers had been too quick to clear away the wreckage and could be destroying valuable evidence.

Relatives of a 12-year-old girl whose body was pulled from the wreckage on Sunday told AFP they thought she might have survived if rescuers had reached her sooner.

Follow Emirates 24|7 on Google News.