The investigation into the violent head-on train crash in southern Italy that killed more than two dozen people is focusing in particular on the antiquated telephone alert system used to advise station masters of trains running on the single track.
Recovery operations using a giant crane and rescue dogs continued into yesterday to remove the mangled debris of the two commuter trains that slammed into one another just before noon on Tuesday in the neat olive groves of Puglia.
After visiting the crash site, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi declared it an “absurd” tragedy and vowed to investigate fully.
Photo: Reuters
Union leaders and railway police blamed human error, noting that the particular stretch of track between the towns of Andria and Corato did not have an automatic alert system that would engage if two trains were close by and on the same track. Rather, news reports said, the system relied on station masters phoning one another to advise of a departing train.
“Surely one of the two trains shouldn’t have been there, and surely there was an error. We need to determine the cause of the error,” Railway Police Commander Giancarlo Conticchio said.
Italian Red Cross workers yesterday were shuttling family members to the morgue in Bari to help identify the dead. Coroner Franco Introna told the ANSA news agency that 22 bodies were at the morgue, with five more expected to arrive later from Andria.
Passengers described being thrown forward violently at the moment of impact, and then trying to free themselves from the tangle of metal, body parts and debris in the scorching midday sun.
“I don’t know what happened, it all happened so quickly, I don’t know,” said one woman, who was eight months pregnant. “I saw my mother on the ground, my father and my sister bleeding, I don’t know, I don’t know, even I don’t know.”
One elderly couple described their ordeal to local television station Telesveva. The man, his head covered in gauze, said he was knocked to the ground, while his wife, still barefoot, described how she came across body parts as she freed him.
“I pulled him from under the debris, myself barefoot, from under the debris and metal,” said the woman, who was not identified. “I went to my husband screaming. I pulled him by the legs and feet. I climbed past people in pieces, how sad. There was nothing I could do.”
The trains were operated by a private, Bari-based rail company, Ferrotramviaria.
In a telephone interview with state TV, Ferrotramviaria director general Massimo Nitti said the dynamics of what went wrong are still to be determined, but it is clear “one of the trains wasn’t supposed to be there.”
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.