Distraught relatives and friends began arriving yesterday at the municipal morgue of this eastern port city, a day after the worst subway accident in Spain's history left 41 people dead.
Forensic experts said all but one of the victims' bodies had been identified. Thirty were women and most were Spaniards, although Red Cross workers said there was at least one foreign national.
The subway train derailed and overturned on Monday in a tunnel near Jesus station in downtown Valencia. Authorities and witnesses said the train was going too fast and that one of its wheels had broken into pieces.
PHOTO: AP
But Valencia's regional Transport Minister Jose Ramon Garcia Anton said preliminary inspections showed the wheels and the train tracks appeared to be in perfect condition. He said the likely cause was speeding.
Garcia Anton described the scene inside the tunnel as "alarming, a pile of twisted steel, bent and destroyed carriages, broken glass and bent doors."
Of the 47 people injured, 12 remained in hospital and two of those were reported to be in a critical condition.
The train was crowded, as the accident occurred shortly after 1pm when many people would have been heading home for lunch.
Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero cut short a visit to India to travel to Valencia. Officials said he was expected to attend a funeral mass at Valencia's cathedral yesterday evening. King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia were also expected to attend the mass.
Police experts in disaster management were deployed to establish why the train had derailed.
Hundreds of thousands of people were traveling to Valencia yesterday for this week's World Meeting of the Families, to be attended on Saturday and Sunday by Pope Benedict XVI.
The pope prayed for the victims and "has followed with pain ... the dramatic reports," the Vatican said.
Organizers called off all festive celebrations that had been planned ahead of Benedict's visit.
It was the second accident on Valencia's No. 1 line in less than a year. A September collision involving three trains injured at least 30 people, four of them seriously.
Jorge Alvarez, secretary-general of the Independent Railway Union, said it was too early to blame Monday's accident on human error.
He said his union repeatedly warned of safety problems on Valencia's 18-year-old subway system, particularly the No. 1 line.
"The train began to go faster than usual and started to move from one side to the other," Cesar Hernandez Nunez, a 21-year-old student traveling in the second car, told the newspaper El Mundo.
"Right after that it was chaos," he said.
Nunez said he was able to break open a door to leave the train.
"When I got to the track I noticed there were only two carriages. The first had overturned and mine was in a normal position," he said. "There were people on the ground. I couldn't think very much. I pre-ferred to turn away."
About 150 people were evacuated from the station, authorities said.
More than 60 million people used Valencia's subway system last year -- some 165,000 people a day, according to its Web site. The subway has four lines and 116 stations in this city of 800,000 on the country's east coast, some 350km from Madrid.
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