At least 64 people have been killed, officials say, after a Spanish high-speed train collided with another train south of the capital Madrid, reported BBC. With more than 500 passengers travelling on the trains involved in the collision, the death toll is likely to rise, stated the report, citing senior railway officials.
Spanish Health Minister Mónica García said that emergency workers were focusing on rescuing survivors and bodies from the two most damaged train cars. She said that the injured are being sent to different hospitals in the area.
Spain’s rail system operator ADIF said the crash occurred Wednesday morning in the province of Toledo.
"It was a high-speed impact, so we are expecting this to be a tragedy," García said.
The accident happened at 7:45 p.m. (1845 GMT) near the town of Adamuz in the province of Cordoba, about 360 km south of the capital Madrid, reported Reuters.
It involved two high-speed trains, one operated by the private consortium Iryo and the other by Alvia, run by Spain's public railway company Renfe.
The last two out of eight carriages of the trademark-red Iryo train going from Malaga to Madrid derailed and hit the oncoming Alvia, causing the latter's first two carriages to derail and fall down an up to 16.4 ft embankment, it stated.
Ruling out the human error angle, Renfe chief Alvaro Fernandez Heredia said: "There was a 20-second interval between the first derailment and the impact, too short to activate the automatic braking system."
"It must have been some kind of failure in the rolling stock or the infrastructure, and that will take time" to investigate, he stated.
Officials said the Alvia had apparently hit the derailed carriages or undercarriage debris of the Iryo. The 27-year-old driver of the Alvia train died in the crash, Renfe said.
The Iryo train was carrying around 300 people and had just left the historic city of Cordoba. Its speed at the moment of the accident was 110 kph, well below the maximum limit of 250 kph on that stretch.
The oncoming train, carrying 187 people, was travelling at a speed of 205 kph, Renfe said.
The derailed Alvia carriages had 37 people in the first and 16 in the second. Most of the dead and injured came from the first two Alvia carriages.
The accident comes with memories still fresh of another crash between high-speed trains in southern Spain in January.
The crash, which occurred in a flat stretch surrounded by olive fields in between the towns of Urda and Los Yébenes, left one car shredded into bits of metal and other material, scattering debris down a gravel slope, reported The Associated Press.
Spanish media earlier reported that 24 had died in the RENFE train, and six in the IRYO one, but soon the death toll began to mount and it currently stands at 64.
The updated death toll makes the rail disaster the country's worst since 2013, when 80 people died after a train derailed in north-western Spain
Sebastián Herrero, 46, from Seville, was travelling on the train that was hit by the second train.
He told El Mundo that shortly after the train came to a halt, he felt a "terrible, terrible impact" and was thrown onto the seats in front of him.
"After we fell, there were many people with broken noses, broken arms... We started seeing smoke everywhere."
A plainclothes police officer arrived and began ordering everyone to evacuate, he says.
Another passenger, Iñaki, 60, tells newspaper El Pais that he felt the train stop before "a strong impact" that sent him rolling on the floor.
Outside the carriage, he saw injured people and fatalities.
