Four US citizens were among at least 69 people killed in the high-speed train crash in central Spain, officials have said, as authorities continued efforts to identify the victims.
The collision happened on 28 October near Urda, in Toledo province, when a high-speed train struck the rear of another service that had stopped. Two carriages derailed and 58 people were injured.
Victims identified after Spain train crash
Spain’s Centre for Integrated Data, the legal body responsible for identifying victims in mass-fatality incidents, said the dead also included citizens of Canada, Japan, Argentina, Mexico, Tunisia and the Czech Republic.
Two Australians and another Japanese citizen remain missing, according to reports. A French national and a Portuguese national were also among those killed, alongside 54 Spaniards.
All but three of the victims had been identified by Sunday night. The centre said some families wanted to travel to Spain to complete the identification process in person.
“As the contacted families have expressed their wish to travel to Spain to carry out in-person identification, we are awaiting their arrival in the country,” it said.
The two trains were travelling in the same direction from Madrid to Seville, with more than 540 people on board. Initial findings from independent investigators indicated that the state-owned Renfe train was travelling at between 100 and 125mph when it hit the privately owned Iryo service.
Transport Minister Óscar Puente has attributed much of what went wrong to poor judgement by a traffic controller. Railway unions have disputed that assessment, pointing instead to worsening working conditions and saying that too few controllers are managing increasingly heavy workloads.
The crash was the second major accident this year on the Madrid-Seville line. In January, a train derailed more than two hours farther south and collided with another travelling in the opposite direction, killing 46 people. That incident remains under investigation.
Spain’s high-speed rail network is the second-largest in the world after China’s. It had recorded no fatal crashes since beginning operations more than three decades ago, before the accidents this year.
