Nearly All Spain Train Crash Victims Identified: 12 Foreigners Among the 69 Dead, Including Four Americans
Four United States citizens were among the 69 people killed in last week's high-speed train collision in Spain, authorities have said. One national each from Canada, Japan, Argentina, Mexico, Tunisia and the Czech Republic were also among the dead.
A legal body made up of police and forensics experts, set up to handle the identification work, announced the 10 latest confirmed foreign victims in a statement late on Sunday. It had already announced the deaths of one French and one Portuguese citizen. Of the 69 killed, 54 were Spaniards.
Authorities said all but three of the victims have now been identified. Three reports for missing people remain active, concerning two Australians and one Japanese citizen.
The statement said the contacted families have expressed their wish to travel to Spain to carry out in-person identification, and officials are awaiting their arrival. Relatives have endured an agonising wait as forensics teams identify the dead, sometimes from individual body parts.
Wednesday's disaster struck outside the central village of Urda, around 130 kilometres (80 miles) south of Madrid, when a service by state operator Renfe ploughed into the back of a stationary train belonging to the Spanish company Iryo.
According to the account of the accident, the failure of an automatic safety system halted all trains on a 63-kilometre stretch of track, but a control centre authorised the Renfe service to resume its journey while the other train was still there.
The crash is one of Europe's deadliest rail accidents this century. It was Spain's second high-speed train collision this year, after a crash in the southern region of Andalusia in January killed 46 people, and it has raised fresh questions about the country's rail safety.
The tragedy came one month before a 29 November general election in which Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez will seek to overcome unfavourable polls and extend his eight-year premiership.
