Spain woke to flags at half staff on Tuesday as the nation began three days of mourning for the victims of the deadly train accident in the country’s south, while emergency crews continued to pull bodies from the wreckage.
The official death toll of Sunday’s accident rose to 41 by Tuesday morning, after Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente Santiago said that another corpse had been discovered when a crane lifted a damaged carriage.
Officials have repeatedly warned that that death count may rise, with emergency workers still probing for bodies among what Andalusian regional President Juanma Moreno called “a twisted mass of metal.”
Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told Spanish national television RTVE late Monday that searchers believe they have found three more bodies still trapped in the wreckage. It is not clear if those bodies are included in the official count.
The crash took place Sunday at 7:45 p.m. when the tail end of a train carrying 289 passengers on the route from Malaga to the capital, Madrid, went off the rails. It slammed into an incoming train traveling from Madrid to Huelva, another southern Spanish city, according to rail operator Adif.
The head of the second train, which was carrying nearly 200 passengers, took the brunt of the impact. That collision knocked its first two carriages off the track and sent them plummeting down a 4-meter (13-foot) slope. Some bodies were found hundreds of meters (feet) from the crash site, Moreno said.
Officials looking at broken track as potential cause
Officials are continuing to investigate the causes of the incident that Puente has called “truly strange” since it occurred on a straight line and neither train was speeding.
But Puente said in interviews with Spanish media late Monday and early Tuesday that officials had found a broken section of track that could possibly be related to the accident’s origin, while insisting that is just a hypothesis and that it could take weeks to reach any conclusions.
“Now we have to determine if that is a cause or a consequence (of the derailment),” Puente told Spanish radio Cadena Ser.
The train that jumped the track belonged to the private company Iryo, while the second train, which took the brunt of the impact, belonged to Spain’s public train company, Renfe. Iryo said in a statement Monday that its train was manufactured in 2022 and passed its latest safety check on Jan. 15.
Both Puente and Álvaro Fernández, the president of Renfe, said that both trains were traveling well under the speed limit of 250 kph (155 mph) and “human error could be ruled out.”
King and Queen to visit Adamuz
The accident shook a nation that leads Europe in high-speed train mileage and takes pride in a network that is considered at the cutting edge of rail transport.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited the accident site near the town of Adamuz on Monday, where he declared three days of mourning with flags lowered on all public buildings and navy vessels.
Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia are scheduled to visit Adamuz and a hospital in Cordoba where many of the injured remain under care on Tuesday.
Health authorities said that 39 people remained hospitalized on Tuesday morning, while 83 people were treated and discharged.
Meanwhile, Spain’s Civil Guard is collecting DNA samples from family members who fear they have loved ones among the unidentified dead.
Train services Tuesday between Madrid and cities in Andalusia, Spain’s most populous region, remained canceled, causing large disruptions. Spanish airline Iberia added flights to Seville and Malaga to help stranded travelers. Some bus companies also reinforced their services in the south.
Source: AP
--Agencies
