Spain transport minister refuses to resign over high-speed rail crash that killed at least 69
Óscar Puente has rejected mounting calls to step down after a Renfe high-speed train ploughed into a stationary Iryo train near Urda, saying his duty is to fix the problems the disaster has exposed rather than debate his position.
BBC World
Spain's transport minister Óscar Puente has said he will not resign over the high-speed rail collision that has left at least 69 people dead, telling a news conference in Madrid that he had "nothing to hide" and repeating the government's vow to get to the bottom of the disaster.
"My duty right now is not to talk about whether I should remain in my position, but to resolve the problem," Puente said. He has faced calls to step down in the aftermath of the tragedy 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 a 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.
The crash was one of the worst rail disasters in Europe's modern history and Spain's worst since 2013. It came less than a year after a collision on the same Madrid-Seville route killed 46 people in Adamuz, in southern Spain, in January. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Friday that public trust in Spain's high-speed rail network had been broken and repeated that it was "unacceptable" for two similar tragedies to happen within a year.
Puente said on Wednesday that a computer failure at about 08:30 that morning led to the initial halt of six moving trains, including the two that subsequently collided.
Leaked audio recordings published in Spanish media revealed conversations between train drivers and a control centre just minutes before the crash. Three recordings between Madrid's control centre and two drivers appear to show that one high-speed train was given clearance to move even though another train had stalled on the track about 25km (15 miles) ahead. Puente had earlier described the decision to instruct the trains to move again without any speed restrictions as "inexplicable".
The leaking of the recordings has drawn criticism from some Spanish politicians. Alberto Ibáñez, a member of Congress for the left-wing Sumar platform, described them as "despicable" in a post on X, while Irene Montero, the prime ministerial candidate for the left-wing Podemos party, said responsibility for the crash should not be placed on one worker, adding that train drivers and experts have been warning against the liberalisation of the railway sector for years.
On Friday, Puente said he was "not going to use any worker as a shield" but acknowledged that "many questions" had arisen from the tragedy and that he wanted to examine them "one by one". "If the investigation shows there is human error we will act in consequence of that," he said.
The conservative People's Party joined calls for Puente's resignation after the trade union CSIF made the same demand earlier this week. But the minister said he would not budge. "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."
The country is observing three days of mourning as the families of victims and survivors of the crash struggle to comprehend how it could have happened.