An anti-nuclear activist died in France yesterday after having a leg cut off by a train transporting nuclear waste to Germany, France's SNCF railway operator said.

"The driver noticed a group of people sitting on the tracks. Some of them got up. He pulled the emergency brake, but one of the people remained sitting, and one of his legs was cut off and he has died," a spokeswoman for SNCF said.

The accident happened close to the town of Avricourt in eastern France in a section where the railway tracks curve through the forest, the SNCF said.

The train had left Valognes in northern France on Saturday and was heading to the storage facility in the German village of Gorleben.

Anti-nuclear activists protesting against such shipments have clashed violently with police in previous years. In 2002, protesters disrupted the passage of the train by setting tyres alight on the tracks and chaining themselves to the rails.

In the northern German town of Dannenberg, where the casks of radioactive material were to be loaded on to lorries and driven a few kilometres to Gorleben, thousands of people protested on Saturday.

A spokesman for the German branch of Friends of the Earth International said planned demonstrations would still take place, despite the death of the protester.