Spanish transport minister refuses to resign over second major train crash on his watch

Spain’s transport minister on Friday rejected calls for his resignation over the second train accident on his watch to cause mass casualties this year, as authorities worked to identify the victims from a crash that left at least 69 dead. Lawmakers from across the political spectrum this week condemned Transport Minister Oscar Puente for attributing Wednesday’s crash to a break in protocol by control centre operators rather than accepting responsibility, with rail workers’ unions calling for his immediate dismissal. The crash, which happened near the town of Urda in central Spain, followed another accident involving the same rail companies on the same line that left 46 dead in January.

It has reopened a debate about safety and maintenance on Spain’s high-speed rail network, the most extensive in Europe, as the country prepares for an election that left-leaning Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has called for November 29. “My duty now is not to focus on discussing whether I will remain in office, but on solving the problem, determining exactly what happened and providing clear explanations,” Puente said at a press conference on Friday. The train that smashed into a second stationary one was travelling at a speed between 160 and 200 kph when the collision occurred, according to a preliminary report released on Thursday by the Independent Authority for the Technical Investigation of Accidents and Incidents (AITAT). “The sequence of malfunctions, instructions, and actions eventually led to the collision, in the absence of the necessary mitigating barriers,” AITAT said in the report. AITAT said it would not be able to confirm the exact speed of the train until it extracted information from the train’s black box. At the scene of the crash, large cranes were lifting the mangled…