A high-speed train crash has killed at least 68 people and injured dozens more in central Spain.
It occurred when a train travelling from Madrid to Seville barrelled into another train – which was stationary on the tracks – on Wednesday morning. The force saw several carriages fall down an embankment.
The transport minister said a computer failure followed by human error caused the crash, which is one of the worst in Europe’s modern history, and Spain’s deadliest train disaster in 13 years.
Survivors described harrowing scenes of passengers being thrown into the air, trapped in the wreckage and smashing windows to get out.
The crash happened just after 09:00 (08:00 GMT) around 140km (87 miles) south of Madrid, between the municipalities of Mora and Orgaz.
The stationary train, run by private rail operator Iryo, had 147 passengers on board, and had stopped on the tracks because of a computer failure, Spain’s Transport Minister Óscar Puente said.
He explained that when there is a system failure, a 24-hour control centre in Madrid takes over, but it had made an “inexplicable” decision to instruct the trains to move again, without any speed restrictions.
Iryo said its train was “struck from behind” by another train, run by Spain’s state-owned railway company, Renfe, which was carrying 397 passengers.
The force of the crash was “brutal”, said 62-year-old passenger Salvador Arriza who was sitting in the Renfe-operated train.
Passengers started breaking the windows to get out, he told Reuters, adding that “some people couldn’t move because they were trapped amongst the seats.”
One of the carriages caught fire, and passengers described devastating scenes of trapped people crying and bleeding, with some buried under debris.
Pictures show that a long piece of railway track had speared 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 halt.
There was a lot of smoke and confusion, he said, 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 who had 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 El Pais newspaper, was walking to 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, 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 said 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 rushed to the scene, and a helicopter evacuated those with the most serious injuries.
Spain’s Civil Guard said it would need DNA samples from relatives to identify some victims.
“The whole of Spain is grieving”, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said during a visit to the crash site. “Lives have been shattered, families have been torn apart, the pain is immense.”
Spain was already reeling from a high-speed rail disaster near Córdoba in January that killed 46 people. It happened on the same rail line, but much further south.
Wednesday’s crash is the worst the country has seen since 2013, when when 80 people died on the outskirts of Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain.
“Spain has the right to know what is happening with its infrastructure,” said Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the the main opposition People’s Party.
Spanish trade union CSIF has demanded the transport minister resign, accusing him of “scapegoating” a traffic manager, by blaming human error in the control room, instead of “taking responsibility”.
Sánchez and other Spanish politicians cancelled all public engagements on Wednesday, including campaigning for next month’s parliamentary elections.
The prime minister said it was “unacceptable” for Spain to have two serious train crashes in one year, and vowed to “get to the bottom of this” and determine if there was any negligence.
“If there have been failures in the security system, they will be addressed with the utmost firmness.”
