Four Americans among at least 69 killed in Spain high-speed train crash, officials say

Four citizens of the United States were among the at least 69 people killed when a high-speed train slammed into the rear of another train in central Spain last week, officials said on Sunday.

The Center for Integrated Data, the legal body in Spain responsible for identifying victims of events with a high death toll, said Sunday night that the dead also included one citizen each from Canada, Japan, Argentina, Mexico, Tunisia and the Czech Republic. Two citizens of Australia and a citizen of Japan remain missing, Agence France-Presse and local media reported.

The center had previously announced the deaths of a French citizen, a Portuguese citizen and 54 Spaniards. It said that all but three of the victims had been identified.

"As the contacted families have expressed their wish to travel to Spain to carry out in-person identification, we are awaiting their arrival in the country," the statement said, according to AFP.

The collision happened on the morning of Oct. 28 in Urda, in the province of Toledo, when the high-speed train struck the back of another train that had stopped, derailing two cars. Officials said 58 people were injured. The two trains, carrying more than 540 people in total, were traveling in the same direction from Madrid to Seville.

Transport Minister Óscar Puente has blamed much of what went wrong on a traffic controller's poor judgment. Railway unions have rejected that account, pointing to deteriorating working conditions. They argue that too few controllers are managing growing workloads, which makes it increasingly difficult to guarantee the safety of millions of passengers.

Independent investigators said their initial findings indicated that the state-owned RENFE train was moving at between 100 and 125 mph when it hit the privately owned IRYO train.

The crash was the second major accident on the Madrid to Seville line this year. In an earlier incident more than two hours farther south along the route, a train derailed and struck another train traveling in the opposite direction, killing 46 people. That crash remains under investigation.

Spain's high-speed rail network, the second-largest in the world after China's, has long been viewed as a success of state industrial policy. Before this year, it had recorded no fatal crashes since entering service more than three decades ago.