BEIJING : Five more railway officials were sacked for causing a train crash in east China that killed 72 people in the nation's worst rail accident in over a decade, state press said on Sunday.

"The mistakes of these officials directly caused the disaster," the Xinhua news agency cited local authorities as saying. They join three other rail officials sacked in the immediate aftermath of last Monday's crash.

Seventy-two people were killed and more than 400 injured when a train travelling from Beijing to Qingdao -- site of the Olympic sailing events -- derailed in Shandong province and slammed into an oncoming train.

Preliminary investigations blamed local rail authorities for failing to order the Qingdao-bound train to slow down at a construction site where an additional rail line was being built for the Olympic Games, officials said.

The train was travelling at 131 kilometres (81 miles) an hour at the time of the accident, well in excess of that rail section's 80-kilometre-an-hour limit, according to officials who carried out the initial investigations.

Those in the latest group to be sacked were mid-ranking officials from the Jinan Railway Bureau, which oversees the rail line, and the Zibo city rail section, where the accident occurred, Xinhua reported.

They were not specifically identified.

The other three sacked last week were Chen Gong, director of the Jinan Railway Bureau, his deputy Guo Jiguang, and Chai Tiemin, head of the Communist Party in the bureau.

An ongoing investigation is focusing on the foundation of the rail line at the construction site where workers are trying to complete a new railway from Jinan city to Qingdao before the August Games, officials said last week.

- AFP/vm