High-speed train crash kills at least 68 people in Spain

At least 68 people have been killed and dozens more injured after a collision involving two high-speed trains in central Spain, in one of the country’s deadliest rail disasters in more than a decade.

The crash occurred shortly after 9:00 a.m. local time on Wednesday, between the municipalities of Mora and Orgaz, about 140 kilometres south of Madrid. The impact caused several carriages to derail and tumble down an embankment, leaving passengers trapped inside the wreckage.

Survivors described scenes of panic and devastation, with passengers thrown from their seats, injured people crying for help and others smashing windows to escape overturned carriages.

Spain’s Transport Minister, Óscar Puente, said a computer failure followed by human error was suspected of contributing to the disaster. Authorities have pledged a thorough investigation to establish exactly what happened and whether any negligence occurred.

The accident involved a train operated by private rail company Iryo and another operated by state-owned railway company Renfe.

According to information provided by the transport minister, the Iryo train had 147 passengers on board and was stationary on the tracks following a computer failure. The Renfe-operated train, which was travelling from Madrid to Seville, was carrying 397 passengers when the collision occurred.

Iryo said its train was struck from behind by the other train.

Puente explained that a control centre in Madrid, which operates around the clock, takes control when certain system failures occur. He said the centre had made an “inexplicable” decision to instruct the trains to move again without imposing speed restrictions.

The minister’s account has raised questions about the decisions made during the system failure. However, the precise sequence of events and the responsibility for the crash remain matters for the investigation.

Passengers who survived the collision described a violent impact that left people injured, trapped and struggling to escape.

Salvador Arriza, 62, who was travelling on the Renfe-operated train, told Reuters that the force of the crash was “brutal”. He said passengers began breaking windows to get out, while others remained trapped among the seats.

One carriage caught fire, and witnesses described scenes of smoke, bloodied passengers and people buried beneath debris. Images from the scene reportedly showed a long section of railway track piercing one of the carriages.

Tangui Binier, 22, who was travelling on the Iryo train, told the BBC that suitcases flew through the carriage as passengers screamed before the train came to a halt.

He described seeing a carriage completely overturned after getting outside. Binier also recalled his father carrying a girl with a broken hip away from the wreckage.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever recover,” he said, describing the traumatic scenes he witnessed.

Spanish journalist Antonio Jiménez Barca, who works for El País, was walking towards the cafeteria on the Renfe train when the collision occurred. He said he was thrown to the ground and sustained a head injury, finding himself covered in blood with other passengers on top of him.

Another passenger, Sebastián Herrero, 46, told El Mundo that he saw people suffering broken noses and arms. He described the impact as so severe that he felt he had been airborne for several seconds.

Other survivors spoke of shock and grief, including one passenger who described a woman dying in his arms.

Emergency services deployed dozens of ambulances to the crash site, while a helicopter was used to evacuate some of the most seriously injured passengers.

Rescue workers faced the difficult task of reaching people trapped in damaged carriages and recovering victims from the wreckage.

Spain’s Civil Guard said DNA samples from relatives would be needed to identify some of the deceased, highlighting the severity of the destruction.

The number of people injured and the condition of survivors remained a major concern as emergency operations and identification procedures continued.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited the crash site and expressed condolences to victims and their families.

“The whole of Spain is grieving,” Sánchez said, describing the impact on families and communities as immense.

He called it unacceptable for Spain to experience two serious train disasters in the same year and vowed to establish the circumstances surrounding the latest collision.

The prime minister said investigators would examine whether negligence or failures in the railway system contributed to the deaths.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the opposition People’s Party, also called for answers, saying Spain had a right to understand what was happening with its railway infrastructure. He pledged that any identified security failures should be addressed firmly

The disaster has also triggered political debate over responsibility for rail safety and the handling of the emergency.

Most political parties cancelled campaign events scheduled for Wednesday as the country mourned the victims.

The far-right Vox party, however, said it would not participate in what its leader, Santiago Abascal, described as attempts to use the national mourning period to suppress criticism of railway infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Spanish trade union CSIF called for the transport minister to resign. The union accused him of shifting blame onto a traffic manager by highlighting possible human error in the control room rather than accepting responsibility at the political level.

The allegations have added to calls for an independent and comprehensive examination of the decisions and systems involved in the crash.

The collision has renewed concerns about railway safety in Spain, which suffered another deadly high-speed rail disaster near Córdoba in January that killed 46 people, according to the report.

Wednesday’s crash was described as Spain’s deadliest train disaster since July 2013, when 80 people died in a derailment near Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.

With the latest tragedy claiming dozens of lives, investigators are expected to face intense scrutiny as they work to determine how the collision occurred and whether measures could have prevented it.

For the families of those killed and the survivors recovering from their injuries, the immediate priority remains identifying victims, treating the wounded and coming to terms with the scale of the disaster.