WARSAW — Poland began two days of mourning yesterday for 16 people killed in its worst rail disaster in two decades, as investigators probing the cause of the trains' head-on crash said human error was to blame.
A station master responsible for scheduling one of the doomed trains was charged with "unintentionally causing a transport disaster" following his detention earlier in the day, and could face up to eight years in prison, prosecutor Tomasz Ozimek told reporters.
The man, who has been placed under psychiatric care after doctors found he was suffering from shock, allegedly directed the north-bound train onto the wrong track, putting it on a collision course with a south-bound train speeding down the same line.
Also yesterday, investigators detained another man responsible for scheduling the trains, which crashed on Saturday as they travelled on the same section of track at Szczekociny, some 200 kilometres (120 miles) from Warsaw.
Fifty people were still in hospital yesterday, three of them in a serious condition.
Meanwhile, crash investigators identified a Russian citizen among the victims, the second foreign national confirmed killed in the crash.
"Her body was identified today," Katarzyna Kuczynska, a spokeswoman for local authorities said yesterday.
An American woman was also among the victims.
A spokesman for the US consulate in the southern Polish city of Krakow said the woman's family had been informed, but declined to provide further details.
Nationals of Ukraine, Moldova and the Czech Republic were also reported to be among the injured.
French and Spanish citizens were among some 350 passengers on the two trains when they collided at around 9:00 pm (2000 GMT) on Saturday, but apparently escaped unscathed.
The massive impact hurled three carriages and both locomotives off the tracks, leaving them piled high on top of each other in a mass of tangled steel.
According to Transport Minister Slawomir Nowak, the crash occurred on a stretch of railway line that had recently been modernised. — AFP
