Spain’s worst rail crash in decades left at least 78 people dead and scores more injured, officials said on Thursday, as investigators tried to establish how a passenger train that many reports said was traveling at excessive speed derailed outside Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.
Emergency workers were still picking their way through mangled debris more than 12 hours after the train crashed and burned in one of Europe’s deadliest rail accidents in recent years. No official cause has been determined, although Spanish media outlets reported that the train, with 218 passengers and nearly 30 crew members on board, was taking a curve at about twice the maximum permitted speed. Some also reported that one of the drivers had been placed under investigation.
