Aleast 39 people have been killed and dozens more taken to hospital after a high-speed train carrying about 300 passengers derailed and collided with an oncoming train in southern Spain on Sunday night.
The tail end of an evening train traveling from Malaga to Madrid with some 300 passengers went off the rails near Córdoba at 7:45 p.m. local time, officials said. It slammed into a train traveling from Madrid to Huelva, another southern Spanish city, according to rail operator Adif.
Spain’s Civil Guard updated the death toll to at least 39 early Monday. It told NBC News that the national protocol for responding to mass casualty incidents had been activated and that its personnel, including experts in fingerprinting and DNA analysis, were joining the effort to identify the victims.
The nationalities of the victims are still unknown.
The collision near Adamuz in Córdoba province involved two trains heading in opposite directions.
One was northbound, travelling from the southern city of Málaga to Madrid’s Atocha station and carrying 289 passengers, four crew members and a driver, according to the private company Iryo, which owned the train.
The second train was southbound and was believed to be carrying nearly 200 passengers from Madrid to the small city of Huelva. It was part of Spain’s public train company, Renfe.
Andalusia’s regional president, Juanma Moreno, said 75 passengers were hospitalized, including 15 in very serious condition. The region was “heartbroken,” he added in a statement on X.
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Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez promised a “thorough and absolutely transparent” investigation into the crash at a news conference in Adamuz, where many locals helped emergency services handle the influx of passengers overnight.
As people scrambled to track down loved ones who were still missing, and officials warned that the death toll could continue to rise, the prime minister, described it as a “night of deep pain for our country”.
The cause of the accident was not yet confirmed, but Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente called it “truly strange” because it happened on a flat stretch of track that had been renovated in May.
He said the train that jumped the track was less than four years old. That train belonged to the private company Iryo, while the second train, which took the brunt of the impact, was part of Spain’s public train company Renfe.
Puente added that the back part of the first train derailed and crashed into the head of the other train, knocking its first two carriages off the track and down a 13-foot slope. He said the worst damage was to the front section of the Renfe train.
Iryo said in a post on X that it “deeply regretted” what happened and had activated all emergency protocols. Renfe chief Álvaro Fernández Heredia called the incident “a tragedy that affects us all.”
Video verified by NBC News showed the aftermath of the accident, with one of the badly mangled trains leaning on its side as a passenger tries to climb out of the window.
Salvador Jiménez, a journalist for Spanish broadcaster RTVE, was on board one of the derailed trains and told the network by phone that “there was a moment when it felt like an earthquake and the train had indeed derailed.”
He said passengers used emergency hammers to break the windows, and that some had walked away without serious injuries.