The regional government of Castilla La Mancha confirmed the death toll and said another 58 people were receiving medical treatment at hospitals. Rescue workers continue searching the wreckage for survivors and bodies.
Spain’s rail system operator ADIF said the crash occurred Wednesday morning in the central province of Toledo, involving two high-speed trains carrying hundreds of passengers and heading in the same direction from Madrid to Seville in southwestern Spain.
A train operated by the state-owned RENFE company struck the rear of another train operated by private company IRYO that had stopped. The collision derailed two cars in a rural area between two villages.
Spain’s Transport Minister Óscar Puente said that the crash was caused by what he called the “inexplicable” order from a central command center for Spain’s trains after a security system had failed. He said the train engineers were not to blame.
Puente said that at 8:30 a.m. the security system on a stretch of 39 miles stopped working due to a computer malfunction, causing all trains on that stretch to stop. But the central command told the RENFE train to start running again without any speed restrictions, and it ended up colliding with the stopped IRYO train at 8:53 a.m.
Puente said that the train should never have been told to start moving again since there was still a “stop signal” active on that line. And if it had, at least it should have been told to go at reduced speed.
Authorities were still studying information to see how fast the train was going, but it could have been at 124 mph for that stretch of the track, Puente said.
