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| In this photo taken on Wednesday July 24 2013, Emergency personnel respond to the scene of a train derailment in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Police say they have detained the driver of a train that crashed in northwestern Spain and killed 78 people. Galicia region National Police Chief Jaime Iglesias says driver Francisco Jose Garzon Amo was officially detained in the hospital where is recovering. |
SANTIAGO DE
COMPOSTELA, Spain (AP) -- Spanish police said Friday they have
arrested the driver of the train that sped through a curve and toppled
over, killing 78 people, and plan to question him over suspected
reckless driving.
As blame increasingly fell
on the still-hospitalized driver over Spain's deadliest railway crash in
decades, authorities located the train's so-called "black box" that is
expected to shed further light on the disaster's cause.
Investigators
said they would seek evidence of failings by Francisco Jose Garzon Amo,
the 52-year-old driver, as well as the train's internal
speed-regulation systems in the Wednesday derailment.
The
chief of the train operator, Renfe, defended the driver Friday, lauding
what it called his exhaustive experience. But the country's railway
agency, Adif, noted that the driver should have started slowing the
train long before reaching the disastrous turn.
In
an interview with The Associated Press, an American passenger injured
on the train said he saw on a TV monitor screen inside his car that the
train was traveling 194 kph (121 mph) seconds before the crash - far
above the 80 kph (50 mph) speed limit on the curve where it derailed.
The passenger, 18-year-old Stephen Ward, said the train appeared to have
accelerated, not decelerated.
And Gonzalo
Ferre, president of the rail infrastructure company Adif, said the
driver should have started slowing the train 4 kilometers (2.5 miles)
before reaching a dangerous bend that train drivers had been told to
respect.
"Four kilometers before the accident
happened he already had warnings that he had to begin slowing his speed,
because as soon as he exits the tunnel he needs to be traveling at 80
kilometers per hour," Ferre said.
At the
scene, hundreds of onlookers watched as crews used a crane Friday to
hoist smashed and burned-up cars onto flat-bed trucks to cart them away.
The shattered front engine had been tipped back upright but remained
resting beside the tracks, just yards (meters) from the passage of
resumed train traffic.
Grieving families
gathered for funerals near the site of the crash in Santiago de
Compostela, a site of Catholic pilgrimage that had been preparing to
celebrate its most revered saint, James, but those annual festivities
were canceled Thursday.
Police lowered the death toll Friday to 78 as forensic scientists matched body parts. They previously had identified 80 dead.
Amo was officially arrested Thursday night in the hospital. Photographs indicated he suffered a head wound in the crash.
Jaime
Iglesias, police chief of Spain's northwest Galicia region, said Amo
would be questioned "as a suspect for a crime linked to the cause of the
accident." When asked, Iglesias described Amo's alleged offense as
"recklessness." He declined to elaborate.
The
driver is being guarded by police and has yet to be interviewed. That
might be delayed because of his medical treatment, Iglesias said.
Renfe
said Amo is a 30-year employee of the state train company, who became
an assistant driver in 2000 and a fully qualified driver in 2003.
Amo
had driven trains past the spot of the accident 60 times and "the
knowledge of this line that he had to have is exhaustive," Renfe's
president, Julio Gomez-Pomar, said in a TV interview.
Police
are still working to identify what they believe are the remains of six
people. Antonio del Amo, the chief scientific officer of Spain's
National Police, cautioned that the death toll could be revised as they
continue their work matching body parts.
Iglesias
said police took possession of the train's "black box," which is
expected to shed light on why it was going faster than the speed limit.
The box will be handed over to the investigating judge, Iglesias said,
adding that the box had not been opened yet.
The
box records the train's trip data, including speed, distances and
braking, and is similar to a flight recorder for an airplane. A court
spokeswoman declined to comment on how long analysis of the box's
contents would take.
One American died in the
cash. She was identified by the Diocese of Arlington as Ana Maria
Cordoba, an administrative employee from northern Virginia.
Also among the dead were an Algerian and a Mexican, Spanish police said Friday.
Eyewitness
accounts backed by security-camera footage of the moment of disaster
showed that the eight-carriage train was going too fast as it tried to
turn left underneath a road bridge. After impact, witnesses said a fire
engulfed passengers trapped in at least one carriage, most likely driven
by ruptured tanks of diesel fuel carried in the forward engines.
Ward,
an 18-year-old Mormon missionary from Utah who was on the train, said
he was writing in his journal when he looked up at the monitor and saw
the train's speed. Then, he said, "the train lifted up off the track. It
was like a roller coaster."
Seconds later,
Ward remembered, a backpack fell from the rack above him and he felt the
train fly off the track. That was his last memory before he blacked out
on impact.
When Ward woke up, someone was
helping him walk out of his train car and crawl out of a ditch where the
car had toppled over. He thought he was dreaming for 30 seconds until
he felt his blood-drenched face and noticed the scene around him.
"Everyone
was covered in blood. There was smoke coming up off the train," he
said. "There was a lot of crying, a lot of screaming. There were plenty
of dead bodies. It was quite gruesome."
It was
Spain's deadliest train accident since 1972, when a train collided with
a bus in southwest Spain, killing 86 people and injuring 112.
