The death toll from the head-on collision of two trains in central Greece has risen to at least 40 people, with many more missing, according to the state broadcaster, while several of those wounded remained in critical condition.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT) reported that 50 to 60 people were still unaccounted for.
As rescue workers stepped up efforts to find survivors amid the still-smoking wreckage – hours after the crash – the Greek fire brigade said 66 of the estimated 85 people hurt in the collision had been taken to hospitals in nearby Larissa. Six are in intensive care.
“It’s an unspeakable tragedy,” the government’s spokesperson, Yiannis Oikonomou, told reporters. “Our thoughts are with the relatives of the victims, the missing and the injured.”
The trains – a passenger service travelling from Athens to the northern city of Thessaloniki, and a cargo train on its way from Thessaloniki to Larissa – collided head-on outside the town of Tempe shortly before midnight on Tuesday. The train carrying 342 passengers and 10 staff had set off from the Greek capital four hours earlier.
Many of the victims were described as students who were gathered in the first two carriages, which sustained the full force of the impact of the crash and had been “almost completely destroyed”. The second carriage served as the train’s canteen.
Roubini Leontari, the chief coroner at Larissa’s general hospital, told local media that 35 bodies “right now are in the morgue while the transfer of other bodies is continuing”.
Some bodies, she said, were burnt beyond recognition and most were of young people.
By mid-morning on Wednesday, appeals for blood donors had been issued by the hospital, with Oikonomou saying the priority for emergency services was to find people believed to be trapped beneath the twisted debris. Psychological support experts were also at the scene.
The crash was being called the worst train accident in living memory in Greece with the cause of the collision attributed, at least initially, to “human error”. The two trains are thought to have travelled along the same track for 2-3km before they met head-on.
ERT reported that the stationmaster in charge of the railway at Larissa had been arrested.
Television channels showed huge cranes removing parts of the buckled, burnt-out carriages where temperatures had risen dramatically as the cars derailed and burst into flames.
Speaking to ERT, Giorgos Mathiopoulos, the president of workers at the National Centre of Emergency Care, said: “The hard work starts now. These are very difficult moments.”
People who survived the crash described heart-wrenching scenes. Several passengers had been thrown through the windows of the train cars on impact; others had fought to free themselves after the train buckled, slamming into a field alongside the tracks near a gorge about 235 miles (380km) north of Athens. It had just exited a tunnel when the collision occurred.
“We find ourselves in front of a senseless tragedy,” Greece’s president, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, said in a statement. “We are mainly mourning young people.”
She announced she would cut short an official visit to Moldova to return to Greece, where a three-day period of mourning was officially declared.
The European Commission’s Greek vice-president, Margaritis Schinas, said flags on all EU buildings would be flown at half-mast “in memory of the victims of the tragedy”.
“A lot of passengers didn’t understand what exactly had happened because they were asleep,” one survivor was quoted as telling the state news agency, ANA-MPA. “I was sleeping, too, and the sudden breaking shook [me awake]. When we realised what had happened, we tried to get out of the wagons, and when we managed that, we saw the chaos.”
Local people who rushed to the area described scenes of destruction. “There were many big pieces of steel,” said Vassilis Polyzos, among the first to reach the site. “The trains were completely destroyed, both passenger and cargo trains.”
Visiting the site of the tragedy, the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, said the most pressing duty was not only to “treat the wounded and identify bodies” but to get to the bottom of how the tragedy had occurred. “There is one thing only that I can guarantee: we will learn the cause of the tragedy and we will do whatever passes through our hands for something like this to never happen again,” he told reporters.
Other politicians, including Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the leftist main opposition Syriza party, were also on their way to Tempe. Many were asking how a transport accident of such scale could occur in modern times. Rail transport in Greece is operated by the Italian group Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, which runs 342 passenger and commercial routes a day. It was announced that train services nationwide would be suspended.
A police investigation has been launched into the cause of the crash. A public prosecutor, Stamatis Daskopolopoulos, who has been given the task of overseeing the inquiry, said witnesses had begun giving testimony.