Madrid, Spain – Joaquim Torres, who was travelling on a train which crashed into another on Wednesday, rushed to help his fellow passengers who had been injured. Fighting back tears, he told Al Jazeera: “I held this woman in my arms and tried to comfort her, but she stopped breathing. She died, she died.” One of about 500 passengers caught in the deadly crash, Torres had been travelling on a high-speed train from the capital, Madrid, to Seville in the south of the country.
All seemed normal, until the huge crash just before 9am. At least 68 people were killed and 77 others were injured. Spain’s national train operator Renfe has launched an investigation into the disaster, which happened in a rural area between Urda and Los Yebenes, two small towns south of Toledo in central Spain.
But the disaster has renewed a national debate over whether Spain’s high-speed train network is safe, nine months after another train crash on the same line in which 46 people died and scores were injured at Adamuz, near Cordoba in southern Spain. Sebastian Herrero, a 46-year-old doctor who was on the train, described the scene after Wednesday’s collision. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could still be alive in those three carriages.
It’s a twisted mass of metal. It’s as if a bomb had gone off,” he told Al Jazeera. Rescuers searched for survivors through the mangled wreckage of three carriages at the front of the train, which had smashed into a stationary locomotive.
Desperate relatives were waiting at Seville train station holding pictures of loved ones who had failed to arrive in the southern city, as Spanish TV presenters, dressed in black, reported on the tragedy. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who has declared three days of national mourning, said: “All of Spain is mourning,” before adding that it is “not acceptable for a country like Spain” to have two major train disasters in one year. A judicial investigation is expected to begin shortly.
Spain’s Transport Minister Oscar Puente said the deadly crash happened after a Renfe train was authorised to continue on its journey – despite an active red signal because of a stationary train on the line ahead, operated by the Italian consortium Iryo. Puente said the red signal had been issued due to a computer communications failure which automatically stopped traffic, and an “inexplicable” order from the central command centre was given for the Renfe train to move on. He said train engineers were not to blame.
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