Three people have died, and dozens of others were injured when a high-speed train travelling from Munich, Germany, to Prague collided with a commuter passenger train in the Czech Republic.
The victims were the drivers of both trains and a female passenger.
Forty people suffered different injuries during the incident. Eight of them were seriously wounded.
The victims are all Czech nationals.
Human Error
Czech Transport Minister Karel Havlicek, who was making his way to the scene, tweeted that human error likely caused the crash.
He claimed the driver of the high-speed train “went through a signal indicating Stop”.
The express locomotive driver didn’t react to a yellow signal, nor the stop signal and just kept going,” said the minister.
“The situation is serious,” Havlicek said.
A spokesman for Länderbahn, the private German operator of the “Alex” express train, said its train was carrying 20 people; after crossing the border, the company said the train had been handed over to a Czech partner.
“These are terrible images that have reached us from the Czech Republic,” said Wolfgang Pollety, chief executive of Länderbahn.
“Everything will be done to help people on the ground . . . we wish all injured a rapid recovery.”
Czech and Bavarian rescue teams hurried to the crash site to attend to wounded passengers while four helicopters ferried the critically injured to hospital.
Czech prime minister Andrej Babis expressed his condolences to relatives of the dead. “It’s important now to save lives,” he wrote on Twitter, “after that everything must be cleared up.”
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