BEIJING - 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.

"We are all very sad that he passed away so suddenly," said the corporation's publicity official, who would only give his surname as Yang. "He was a great and selfless entrepreneur. It is not exaggerating at all to call him a lofty person."

The spokesman refuted speculation that Ma had died because he was afraid he would have to take much of the responsibility for the crash.

"The crash is not something we should blame on a single person," he said.

Ma's sudden death provoked outcries on the Internet. Some Internet users worried that it would affect the investigation into the crash.

But Zhao Jian, a transport expert with Beijing Jiaotong University, said that Ma's death will not have an influence on the crash investigation. He said there is enough evidence in technical papers to identify the accident's causes.

Zhao insisted that Ma won't be made into a scapegoat and forced to shoulder the blame for others.

"It shouldn't just be designer of the signaling equipment who takes responsibility," he said. "Those who assessed the equipment and decided to use it should also bear some of the responsibility."

Also on Tuesday, it was confirmed that Wen Qingliang, former head of the Kunming railway bureau, was fired on Aug 16, according to the Kunming-based Spring City Evening News.

Wen is the 12th railway official to be dismissed from his position since the former railways minister Liu Zhijun was forced to step down in February as the result of a graft probe.