Madrid (CNN) — A passenger train crash in northwestern Spain Wednesday killed more than 56 people and injured more than 100, a regional official said.
Agustin Hernandez Fernandez of the Galicia infrastructure ministry said more than 20 injured victims remained in critical condition early Thursday.
Investigators are looking at all possible causes of the crash, a senior aide to Spain’s prime minister said Wednesday; their initial assessment is that it likely wasn’t the result of terrorism.
Pictures of the scene showed at least one train car snapped in two and another one of the train’s cars on fire. Rescue crews and fellow passengers pulled out bodies through broken train windows as stunned survivors looked on. Police escorted bloodied passengers from the wreckage.
State railway Renfe said the train derailed on a curve as it was approaching the train station in the city of Santiago de Compostela.
The high-speed train had 218 passengers aboard and was traveling from Madrid to the town of Ferrol in northwest Spain when it derailed at 8:41 p.m., the railway said.
The chief spokesman for Renfe said he did not know how many crew members were aboard. Normally there would be at least five crew members on a train like that, he said.
It was unclear how fast the train was traveling when it crashed. The train was capable of going up to 250 kilometers per hour (155 mph), the spokesman said.
Alen Perez, 16, said he had been walking nearby and saw several passengers and witnesses helping each other out of the train.
Emergency vehicles swarmed the scene. There were several bodies on the ground, he said.
Photos he took of the crash site showed mangled pieces of a train car and black smoke billowing out of the wreckage.
“The train had broken in half. Some pieces were on top, some pieces were on the bottom,” said Ivette Rubiera Cabrera of Florida, who caught a glimpse of the wreckage while on a family vacation in Spain and sent photos to CNN’s iReport.
“It was quite shocking,” she said. “We had never seen anything like that. We had just been on the train last week.”
Firefighters, police and psychologists were at the scene, the Galicia government said in a statement. In Twitter posts, officials said blood donations were needed as a result of the crash.
Spain’s airport authority said it was investigating.
“The efforts now center on searching for bodies and victims that could still be alive in the wreckage of the cars,” journalist Ignacio Carballo from the Voz de Galicia newspaper told CNN en Español.
The crash occurred just hours shortly before an annual celebration was set to start in Santiago de Compostela, a popular tourist destination.
Local officials have canceled festivities planned for Wednesday night and Thursday.
