BEIJING — A deadly train accident in eastern China has added to a national sense of unease that safety may have been sacrificed in the country’s rush to modernize.

　　By Sunday evening, 43 bodies had been recovered from the wreckage near Wenzhou, where a high-speed train that had lost power was struck from behind by another train on Saturday night, the official Xinhua news agency reported. Six cars derailed and four fell off a viaduct in the accident, which also injured 210 people.

　　In official, government-approved accounts of the accident, officials moved quickly to take charge of the situation. On Sunday morning, President Hu Jintao declared that rescue efforts were a top priority. The government also announced that three senior officials in the Railway Ministry had been fired. The railway minister was said to have taken charge of the rescue operation.

　　But competing narratives already began emerging Sunday. On the feisty microblogging site Sina Weibo, postings said that the minister, Sheng Guangzu, who took over this year when his predecessor was fired for corruption, had been cornered by angry journalists after he dodged interview requests.

　　Other reports on the site said the ministry was burying parts of the wrecked trains near the site, prompting critics to say that the wreckage needed to be carefully examined for causes of the malfunction. The Railway Ministry said the trains contained valuable “national level” technology that could be stolen and thus must be buried — even though foreign companies have long complained that the technology was actually stolen from their trains.

　　More confusion emerged over efforts to portray nature as the culprit in the accident. Xinhua reported Saturday that the first train lost power when it was hit by lightning, and national television broadcasts emphasized pictures of lightning storms in the area. But later reports by Xinhua said the supposedly stalled train was under way when it was struck by the other train. Also left unexplained was why railway signals did not stop the second train before it hit the first one.

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