Spain's transport minister resigns after 69 killed in train crash disaster

Spain’s transport minister Oscar Puente said on Tuesday that he is resigning, six days after a high-speed train collision south of Madrid left 69 people dead.

He made the announcement at the close of a lengthy appearance before lawmakers about the crash, which was the second deadly collision this year to involve Spain’s extensive high-speed rail network.

“A transport minister in a country like Spain cannot continue in his post after two accidents in less than a year,” Puente told lawmakers. “It’s a question of political dignity, coherence and empathy with the victims.”

The crash on 28 October happened when a high-speed train slammed into another that had stopped on the tracks.

The chain of events that led to disaster began when the communication system key to the functioning of the security system on the Madrid-Seville line went down.

Central controllers in Madrid then took over and gave the go-ahead for one train to proceed, even though there was a stationary train ahead. It was subsequently confirmed that a British scientist died in the crash.

Dr Marta Shahbazi, a leading expert in cell biology and embryology, was on board one of the two high speed services that collided near the town of Urda, south of Madrid.

The 41-year-old researcher, who headed her own laboratory at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, had been travelling to south-west Spain to receive a prestigious award from the Spanish Society for Developmental Biology.

Last week’s crash was the second major collision on the Madrid-Seville line this year.

In January, more than two hours further south along the route, a train derailed and struck another traveling in the opposite direction, killing 46 people. That crash remains under investigation.

The collisions have raised fresh concerns about the safety of the country’s rail network.

The most recent crash came four weeks before a national election. Spain’s high-speed rail network has been considered one of the country’s crowning achievements. It is the world’s second-largest, after China’s.

Until this year, it had not experienced a deadly crash since coming into service over three decades ago.