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Up to 60 people are reported to have been killed, and dozens injured, after a train derailed outside the north-western Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela.
The Madrid-Ferrol train, operated by state railway company Renfe, was carrying at least 218 passengers when all 13 carriages came off the tracks.
The Spanish radio station Cadena SER quoted the president of Galicia's main court, Miguel Angel Cadenas, who said 56 were killed, although this could not be immediately confirmed.
The head of the regional Galician government, Alberto Nunez Feijoo, had earlier said the number of deaths was at least 45. “There are bodies lying on the railway track. It's a Dante-esque scene,” he said in a radio interview.
The national government said it was working on the basis that it was an accident.
Train wagons lay on their sides with smoke billowing from the wreckage after it was reported to have caught fire when the train derailed at high speed.
“It seems that on a curve the train started to twist, and the wagons piled up one on top of the other,” one passenger, Ricardo Montesco, told Cadena Ser radio station. “I was in the second wagon and there was fire ... I saw corpses.”
Another witness told the station they had heard an explosion before seeing the derailed train. The accident was reported in the neighbourhood of Angrois around 8.42pm.
A photographer at the scene said he saw dozens of what appeared to be dead bodies being extracted from the wreck by emergency workers. TVE showed footage of what appeared to be several bodies covered by blankets alongside the tracks next to the damaged train wagons and rescue workers entering toppled carriages through broken windows.
. RIP.
