Death toll rises in Spain train collision

2026-01-22 22:46:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

The death toll from a collision between two high-speed trains in Spain has reached 45, after the bodies of two more men were found in a damaged carriage, the Andalusian regional government said on January 22.

The bodies are believed to belong to two people who were reported missing after the accident, which occurred on Sunday evening.

Formal identification by the Cordoba Institute of Forensic Medicine has not yet been carried out.

The bodies were found in a wagon that had fallen about four meters below the railway and had suffered extensive damage.

The number of injured in the accident is 123, of whom 31 remain hospitalized. Six people are still in intensive care, Andalusian emergency services announced in X. However, according to them, none of the injured are in danger of life.

According to the Civil Guard, among the victims were three foreign nationals, all women: one from Germany, one from Russia and one from Morocco.

The president of the Andalusia region, Juanma Moreno, said there were no more missing people and that the search for victims had been suspended.

Identifying the victims has been difficult, so authorities have appealed to families who suspect they may have lost relatives to provide DNA samples.

Forty-three bodies of the victims have already been identified, but their identities have not been made public.

The cause of the accident, one of the worst in Spanish history, is still unknown. Authorities have not ruled out the possibility that the cause was damage to the track or a defect in one of the trains.

Just two days after Sunday's accident, a train driver died after being hit by a local train in Gelida, west of Barcelona. Dozens of passengers were injured, five of them seriously.

Another rail accident occurred on Thursday, when a small local train collided with a crane in Murcia, eastern Spain, and according to authorities, six people suffered minor injuries.

The train drivers' union in Spain has declared a three-day national strike starting on February 9, to support demands for greater safety and reliability on the rail network.

Spain has the largest high-speed train network in Europe with over 3,000 kilometers of railway connecting major cities including Madrid, Barcelona, ??Seville, Valencia and Malaga. /REL