Spanish police detain crashed train driver as suspect

A crane removes a derailed car at the site of a train accident near the city of Santiago de Compostela, Spain on July 25, 2013.

Jaime Iglesias, the police chief in the northwestern region of Galicia, where the accident occurred, said on Friday that the driver, Francisco Jose Garzon Amo, is accused of crimes related to the accident.

The driver, guarded by police at a hospital, has not yet testified due to his medical condition, said Iglesias.

Also on Friday, a spokesman for the Galician Health Ministry said there were still 83 victims of the accident in hospital, of whom 32 were in critical condition.

The arrest came a day after a Spanish judge ordered police to question Amo following reports that he was going twice the speed limit when the train flew off the track on a sharp bend on Wednesday evening just outside the city of Santiago de Compostela.

Sources say Amo admitted immediately after the accident to railway officials by radio that the train had taken the curve at 190 kilometers per hour (118 mph), where the speed limit was 80 km/h.

Meanwhile, investigators have retrieved the train’s black box and are focusing their probe on possible problems with the brakes and speeding by the driver.

According to state railway company, Renfe, the train had no technical problems and had been inspected on the morning of the accident.

At the time of the crash, the train was transporting 218 passengers and five crewmembers from Madrid to the shipbuilding city of Ferrol on the Galician coast.

Why was doomed Spanish train going so fast?

(Reuters) - Why was the train going so fast? Did the driver fail to heed speed limits on a sharp curve? Did brakes fail? What about the safety system meant to force the train or the driver to slow down if going too fast?

These are among issues investigators will look into after Spain's worst train crash in decades, which left at least 80 dead and 94 injured, 35 of them in serious condition.

A day after the crash, the driver of the train which derailed on the outskirts of the northern Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela was under police watch in hospital but had not been arrested.

A judge in the Galicia region ordered police to question the driver, Francisco Jose Garzon, as a suspect and also ordered them to seize the black box of the train.

The 52-year-old driver was a 30-year veteran, said Renfe, the state train company. It has been widely reported that he took a sharp curve with an 80-kmph speed limit at more than twice that speed.

Many newspapers published excerpts from his Facebook account where he boasted of driving trains at high speed. The account was closed early on Thursday.

The driver was not available for comment and Reuters was not able to locate his family or determine whether he has a lawyer.

Representatives of railway unions said it was too early to tell whether the driver was to blame.

"Human error is always a possibility, and in defence of human error what do we have, we have technology, that is what it is for ... but it is very difficult to know what might have happened without, for example, hearing what the driver was saying at the time," said Miguel Angel Cillero, responsible for transport at union UGT.

While police and the judge were looking into potential negligence on the part of the driver, the Public Works Ministry launched a more technical investigation. Renfe and Adif, the state track operator, began their own probes.

Security video footage showed the train, with 247 people on board, hurtling into a concrete wall at the side of the track as carriages jack-knifed and the engine overturned.

The impact was so strong that one carriage of the train flew over a wall and landed on an embankment several metres above.

All this is on CNN.  We don't need back-up.

Personally, I am not surprised. If anyone has been to Madrid they will know what I am talking about. Lunchtime siesta was still in effect where the Spaniards hang out in the piazzas and drink for 2 and 3 hours. Made me miss my flight because travel agency close for siesta. Work is not one of their priorities.  The man was probably on his siesta taking a nap and having a drink.