Spain mourns as country seeks answers to deadly high-speed train collision
Investigators focus on part of track where a ‘practically new’ high-speed train derailed on a straight stretch as nation began three days of mourning
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 Oscar Puente Santiago said that another corpse had been discovered when a crane lifted a damaged carriage.
Officials have repeatedly warned that the 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 on 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 7.45pm 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 travelling 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-metre (13-foot) slope. Some bodies were found hundreds of metres from the crash site, Moreno said.