A high-speed train collision in central Spain has killed at least 68 people and left dozens more injured.
It happened on Wednesday morning when a train heading from Madrid to Seville slammed into another train that was standing still on the tracks. The impact caused several carriages to tumble down an embankment.
The transport minister said a computer failure followed by human error led to the crash, which ranks among the worst in Europe’s modern history and is Spain’s deadliest train disaster in 13 years.
Survivors recounted distressing scenes of passengers being flung into the air, trapped in the wreckage and breaking windows to escape.
The crash took place shortly after 09:00 (08:00 GMT) about 140km (87 miles) south of Madrid, between the towns of Mora and Orgaz.
Spain’s Transport Minister Óscar Puente said the stationary train, operated by private rail company Iryo, had 147 passengers on board and had stopped on the tracks due to a computer failure.
He explained that when a system failure occurs, a 24-hour control center in Madrid takes over, but it made an “inexplicable” decision to tell the trains to move again, with no speed restrictions.
Iryo said its train was “struck from behind” by another train operated by Spain’s state-owned railway company, Renfe, which was carrying 397 passengers.
The impact of the crash was “brutal,” said 62-year-old passenger Salvador Arriza, who was sitting in the Renfe-operated train.
Passengers began breaking the windows to get out, he told Reuters, adding that “some people couldn’t move because they were trapped amongst the seats.”
One carriage caught fire, and passengers described devastating scenes of trapped people crying and bleeding, with some buried under debris.
Images show that a long section of railway track had pierced through one of the carriages.
Tangui Binier, 22, was on the Iryo train and told the BBC that “suitcases started flying and people were screaming” when the train finally came to a stop.
He said there was a lot of smoke and confusion and described seeing the train “completely flipped over” when he stepped outside.
“It was hard to witness,” Binier said, adding that his father carried a girl with a broken hip out of the wreckage.
He also described seeing dead bodies and missing limbs: “I don’t know if I’ll ever recover.”
Spanish journalist Antonio Jiménez Barca, who works for the El Pais newspaper, was walking towards the Renfe train’s cafeteria when the crash happened.
“I felt like I was being pushed from behind, like I was being thrown to the ground,” he described.
“I hit my head horribly… I was covered in blood. There were people on top of me. One person had an injured arm, and another had a head injury.”
Another passenger, 46-year-old Sebastián Herrero, told El Mundo newspaper that he saw “many people with broken noses and broken arms.”
“It was a terrible, terrible impact,” he said, adding that he was “in the air for about four or five seconds,” which felt like a lifetime.
Many of the passengers mentioned they were in shock, and one sobbed during an interview with a local television station as he described a woman dying in his arms.
“She was very cold and she was all alone,” he said, to which the show’s presenter also started to cry.
Dozens of ambulances hurried to the site, and a helicopter airlifted those with the most severe injuries.
Spain’s Civil Guard stated that it would require DNA samples from relatives in order to identify some of the victims.
“The whole of Spain is grieving,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said while visiting the crash site. “Lives have been shattered, families have been torn apart, and the pain is immense.”
Most political parties in Spain called off the campaign events they had planned for Wednesday.
The far-right party Vox was the exception. Its leader, Santiago Abascal, said his party would not participate in what he called attempts to “use mourning to silence criticism” of the country’s rail infrastructure.
Spain was still recovering from a high-speed rail disaster near Córdoba in January that claimed 46 lives. It took place on the same rail line, though considerably further south.
The prime minister said it was “unacceptable” that Spain should suffer two serious train crashes in a single year and pledged to “get to the bottom of this” and establish whether any negligence was involved.
“Spain has the right to know what is happening with its infrastructure,” said Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the main opposition People’s Party.
“If there have been failures in the security system, they will be dealt with the utmost firmness.”
Spanish trade union CSIF has called for the transport minister to resign, accusing him of “scapegoating” a traffic manager by blaming human error in the control room rather than “taking responsibility.”
Wednesday’s crash is the worst the country has experienced since 2013, when 80 people died on the outskirts of Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain.
