Thirty-one people remained hospitalized on Sunday after the train accident last Wednesday in Urda, in the province of Toledo, according to the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha. The crash has killed 69 people, a toll that remained unchanged at the start of Sunday.
Of those still in hospital, 13 were in intensive care and 18 were in conventional beds, the regional government said. The patients were being treated in four hospitals in the region. The number of hospitalized people was three fewer than on Saturday.
Since Wednesday, 79 people have been discharged, and a total of 110 people have been treated in hospitals in Castilla-La Mancha, according to regional government sources.
The Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences of Toledo and Ciudad Real has identified 56 of the 69 deceased. Data provided late Saturday by the Integrated Data Center showed that 51 identifications had been notified to families, corresponding to 33 men and 18 women. A Portuguese citizen is among the victims.
The accident occurred when more than 540 people were traveling on two high-speed trains. According to the Spanish government and recordings of communications with the control center, the driver of one train received incorrect instructions from an operator that did not comply with established protocols for the situation, and the train collided at more than 180 kilometers per hour with another train stopped on the same line. The two trains, which were linking Madrid and Seville, had stopped because of a failure in the automatic traffic control system caused by communication problems between equipment.
The incident is the second fatal train accident in Spain, which has Europe's largest high-speed line, after 46 people died in a train accident in Adamuz, Cordoba, in January.
Sources: Observador.