Job aspirants travel on an overcrowded train at Badaun station on Tuesday. (PTI)

Lucknow, Feb. 1: Nine youths travelling on the roof of the Howrah-bound Himgiri Express were killed and at least a dozen injured when they hit their heads this afternoon against the low, concrete roof of an underpass 240km west of Lucknow.

A tenth man died after he too fell off the roof of another train, the Triveni Express, at Balamou in nearby Hardoi district.

All the dead and injured were among 60,000-odd job-seekers from 11 states who had been turned away this morning from an Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) recruitment camp in Bareilly, prompting them to riot in the town.

Later the youths, many of them believed to be from Bengal, packed into trains out of Bareilly. The Himgiri dead are yet to be identified while the injured, some of them critical, have been shifted to hospitals in Delhi and Bareilly.

The rest of the passengers are to resume their journey from Shahjehanpur station, half a kilometre from accident site Roja, on two special trains.

Many of the young men on the train roof were apparently standing and creating a din and had failed to realise that the road overbridge under which the train was to pass was rather low. Only when some of them hit their heads and fell off the roof, those behind them thought of crouching, passengers said.

The deaths resulted from shock and head injuries, the police said. After the 4pm accident, many of the ITBP job-seekers — who made up the bulk of the passengers — set fire to an AC coach and later ransacked Shahjehanpur station.

“Nothing went right for us since we arrived in Bareilly,” said Raj Yadav, 23, a candidate from Bihar.

The ITBP had advertised 1,400 Grade IV jobs and set up the camp for receiving applications and conducting physical tests. But when tens of thousands turned up, it turned most away from the gates even refusing to receive their applications.

“We had waited almost a whole day.... Many were enraged and resorted to violence in Bareilly. Now this accident has cost lives and we are held up here. It’s been a nightmare,” Yadav said.

Before boarding the trains, the frustrated youths unleashed terror in Bareilly, torching at least six state-owned buses, several other vehicles, shops and a petrol station and stoning the Doordarshan and All India Radio offices. The police had to use force to disperse the mob.

Deputy inspector-general of police D. Prakash said the ITBP had not informed the police about the possibility of such a large turnout of job-seekers. ITBP officials were not available for comment but Union home minister P. Chidambaram faulted the state government for failing to deploy enough police in Bareilly.

Yesterday, the job-seekers had vandalised and torched sugarcane fields in rural Bareilly and set village shops on fire, prompting farmers to fire at them, PTI said. No one was injured, though.

The dead Triveni Express passenger has been identified as Satyabhan Singh, 25.