Spain’s transport minister, Óscar Puente, says he won’t resign over the high-speed rail collision that has left at least 69 people dead.
The transport minister has been facing calls to step down in the aftermath of the tragedy, including from political rivals, a trade union and demonstrators who protested outside the transport ministry on Wednesday night.
Dozens were killed and many more injured when a state-operated Renfe high-speed train smashed into the back of another stationary train operated by the Iryo company near the town of Urda, in the central Toledo province, on Wednesday morning.
A preliminary report released by transport investigators late on Thursday found the Renfe train was travelling between 160km/h (99.4mph) and 200km/h when the collision occurred, causing its front carriage to become embedded in the tail of the stationary train.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said earlier on Friday that public trust in Spain’s high-speed rail network had been broken and repeated it was “unacceptable” that there had been two similar tragedies within a year.
In January a collision on the same Madrid-Seville route killed 46 people in Adamuz in southern Spain.
Wednesday’s tragedy was one of the worst rail disasters in Europe’s modern history, and Spain’s worst crash since 2013.
Also Read: 68 die, 100 in hospital after train collision in Spain
Puente said on Wednesday a computer failure at about 08:30 that morning led to the initial halt of six moving trains, including the two trains that subsequently collided.
On Friday Puente said he was “not going to use any worker as a shield”.
But he said “many questions” arose as a result of the tragedy and he wanted to look at them “one by one”.
“If the investigation shows there is human error we will act in consequence of that,” he said.
The country is observing three days of mourning, as the families of victims and the survivors of the crash struggle to comprehend how it could have happened.
The conservative People’s Party joined calls for Puente’s resignation after trade union CSIF called for the same earlier this week.
But Puente said on Friday he would not budge from his position.”The easy thing for me would be to leave, but neither that fits with my character nor is it what the Prime Minister has asked me to do,” he said.
“I feel immense pain and immense sadness for the victims and their relatives… I cannot let this pain paralyse me though. We have to find solutions to this problem.”
BBC NEWS
