Investigators yesterday worked through the wreckage of a high-speed train crash in eastern Belgium that killed at least three people and injured nine others.
A fast-moving passenger train late on Sunday slammed violently into the back of a slow-moving freight train that was travelling on the same track for reasons that remain unexplained.
Authorities said lightning and flood damage caused by heavy storms that affected all of western Europe in the past few days were being explored as a possible cause.
Photo: EPA
Investigators were on the scene, but a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office in Liege warned that finding the cause “would be difficult.”
Nine passengers were injured to varying degrees with some described as being in a critical condition by authorities during a new briefing near the scene of the crash.
There were about 40 passengers on board the train that was travelling at about 100kph at the moment of the collision.
Investigators believe the passenger train rammed into the freight train that was travelling at about 10kph to 15kph, prosecutor’s office spokeswoman Brigitte Leroy said.
The train was travelling from the west to the east of Belgium on the Namur-Liege line when the accident occurred in the municipality of Saint-Georges-sur-Meuse at 11pm.
The crash killed the driver of the passenger train, officials said.
“The passenger train is really in a bad way, it’s stunning,” said Saint-Georges-sur-Meuse Mayor Francis Dejon, who has been following the rescue operations.
“The front carriage is scrunched back up on itself. We were very lucky not to have more victims,” he told the Belgian news agency Belga.
“Two of the six carriages derailed and are lying on the tracks,” the Infrabel railway infrastructure company and the National Railway Company of Belgium [SNCB] said in a joint statement.
Witnesses told Belga news agency the collision had been “very violent,” with several passengers having to be extracted from the wreckage.
Infrabel spokesman Frederic Sacre said investigators would look carefully at a report of lightening on the tracks about 90 minutes before the crash.
SNCB on Sunday evening said lightning had caused signal problems near the site, but that the incident was over.
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel was to visit the scene with Belgium’s King Philippe yesterday.
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