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The head of a State-owned railway company, which designed the flawed signaling equipment that caused the July 23 train crash near Wenzhou, died from a heart attack on Monday.

His death coincided with an announcement made by investigators who said they plan to soon begin identifying the persons or businesses that were responsible for the crash, which killed 40 people and left nearly 200 injured.

Ma Cheng, 55, the general manager of China Railway Signal and Communication Corp, died from a heart attack in Shenzhen when he was conducting a safety inspection on the new Guangzhou-Shenzhen passenger railway, according to an obituary notice posted on the company's website on Tuesday.

China's railway system has been the subject of intense scrutiny since the Wenzhou tragedy.

The State Council has established an investigation team to look into the accident's causes. The team recently found that the corporation's Beijing national railway research and design institute of signal and communication was responsible for using flawed designs to make the signaling equipment that caused the crash.

The team also blamed faults in the system used to ensure the railways' safety and in the system used to respond to railway emergencies.

The crash was "a completely avoidable accident" and "should not have happened", said Huang Yi, spokesman of the State Administration of Work Safety, on Monday.

Huang said recent weeks have seen the completion of a technical report on the crash and of an expert panel's report on the accident's direct causes. He said the next step will be to identify those who were responsible for the crash.

Sources close to Ma said he had no history of heart troubles and speculated that the huge amount of stress he was under contributed to his death, according to the news website Caixin.

（中國日報網英語點津 Helen 編輯）

About the broadcaster:

Lee Hannon is Chief Editor at China Daily with 15-years experience in print and broadcast journalism. Born in England, Lee has traveled extensively around the world as a journalist including four years as a senior editor in Los Angeles. He now lives in Beijing and is happy to move to China and join the China Daily team.