Sánchez promises transparency and “all means” to clarify accident

O spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, today promised “total transparency” and “all necessary means” to clarify the causes of last week’s railway accident in Urda, Toledo, where at least 69 people died.

“ Independent investigators and justice itself are working to clarify the facts concerning this accident. They will do so with all the means necessary to ascertain the causes with full transparency and exhaustively and rigorously,” he said, in an intervention in Barcelona at the World in Progress conference organized by Grupo Prisa, owner of the newspaper El Pais.

Sánchez said again today that the Urda accident broke the Spanish's confidence in the country's high-speed rail network, the second largest in the world after China.

“ Our primary obligation, as the Government of Spain, is to recover, as soon as possible and at all costs, the confidence of the citizens at high speed,” said the government leader.

The October 28 accident at Urda was the second this year in Spain with high-speed trains, after 46 people died on 18 January in a collision at Adamuz, Córdoba.

Last week, Sánchez said twice that “it is not acceptable” for a country like Spain to have two high-speed network accidents in nine months. Today he said twice that the Urda accident “should never have happened”.

Sánchez announced that on Tuesday the Council of Ministers of Spain will approve a decree with special aid and mechanisms to speed up support already provided by the law for victims and families of victims of the accident.

The Prime Minister and leader of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) did not refer to the resignation of the Minister of Transport, Oscar Puente, who are making right-wing and left-wing parties, including parliamentary partners of the executive and coalition that he is in government.

The Urda accident killed 69 people, including a Portuguese citizen, according to the authorities, who today revealed that three bodies are still to be identified.

According to official data so far, 54 of the identified dead are Spanish and 12 foreigners.

The three unidentified people are also foreign and the process and identification protocols are in these cases longer, said the regional government of Cstela-La Mancha

According to information from their governments, there are two Australian citizens and one Japanese missing in the accident.

Also according to the executive of Castile-La Mancha, of the 110 injured attended in hospitals in the region, 29 remain hospitalized today. Nine of these people are in intensive care units.