U.S. citizen among the dead and at least 5 Americans injured after high-speed train derailed in Spain killing more than 80 passengers

An American citizen was among the more than 80 people who perished when a high-speed train derailed after hurtling around a tight curve in Spain on Wednesday, it has emerged.

A State Department official confirmed that one U.S. citizen is among the dead and that at least five more are injured - but added that these numbers could change as they receive more information.
The identities of these victims have not yet been released.
All eight carriages of the Madrid to Ferrol train derailed near the city of Santiago de Compostela, smashing into a wall, killing more than 80 and injuring more than 140.






Francisco Jose Garzon (left), one of the drivers on the train which crashed, leaving at least 141 people injured including one Briton, is reported to have posted a picture on Facebook of a train speedometer at 125mph (right)

Alongside the photo, which published in March last year, he wrote: 'What joy it would be to get level with the police and then go past them making their speed guns go off. Ha ha!.'
Meanwhile, a terrifying video has emerged which captured the moment the train crashed.
Dramatic video footage from a security camera shows the train careering into a concrete wall as it came off the rails on the bend, before flipping onto its side and hurtling down the railway line with its terrified passengers on board.
One of the drivers was trapped in his cabin and told the railway station by radio that the train entered the bend at 190 kilometres per hour (120 mph), reported newspaper El Pais. The speed limit on that section of track is 80km/h (50mph).
'We're only human! We're only human!' he told the station, the newspaper said, citing sources close to the investigation. 'I hope there are no dead, because this will fall on my conscience.'

Police have put an unnamed train driver under formal investigation; the Galicia government said one driver was in hospital.
Newspaper reports cited witnesses as saying Garzon, who helped rescue victims, had shouted: 'I've derailed! What do I do?' into a phone.

Television footage showed one wagon pointing upwards into the air with one of its ends twisted and disfigured. Another carriage that had been severed in two could be seen lying on a road near the track.
State-owned train operator Renfe said in a statement that 218 passengers and an unspecified number of staff were on board at the time of the accident.

Public visit: Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy (centre), Public Works Minister Ana Pastor (right), and Galician Regional President Alberto Nunez Feijoo (second left) visit the scene of a train accident in Santiago de Compostela

DEADLY JOURNEY: SPAIN'S WORST TRAIN CRASH FOR DECADES

The Spanish train crash is the worst the country has experienced since a terrible three-train accident in a tunnel in Leon province in 1944. Due to heavy censorship at the time, the exact death toll for the Leon disaster has never been established. The official figure was given as 78 dead, but it is thought that as many as 250 may have been killed.
There was another serious accident in Spain 1972 when a Madrid to Cadiz express collided head-on with a local train on the outskirts of Seville in the south west of the country. A total of 77 people died, with more than 100 injured.
The Madrid train bombings of March 2004 produced a death toll of 191- but this was a terrorist outrage and not an accident. There were 10 explosions aboard four commuter trains, with the attacks being directed by an al Qaida-inspired terrorist cell.
The latest incident comes less than two weeks after six people were killed and scores injured in a train crash just south of Paris.
Recent bad train crashes in Europe include one in February 2010 in Buizingen in Belgium which claimed the lives of 18 people, a September 2006 crash of a magnetic levitation train on a test track in the Emsland area of Germany which killed 23 people, and a derailment of a packed train outside the Montenegro capital of Podgorica in January 2006 in which 46 people died.
In Britain, no passenger has been killed in a train accident since 84-year-old Margaret Masson from Glasgow died following the Virgin West Coast Pendolino train derailment at Grayrigg in Cumbria in February 2007.
In terms of deaths, the worst rail crashes in recent times in the UK were outside Paddington in west London in October 1999 when 31 people died in a two-train collision after one of them had gone through a red light, and at Clapham in south London in December 1988 when 35 people were killed in a three-train crash.
Britain's worst peace-time crash was in 1952 at Harrow and Wealdstone in north west London when 112 people died in a three-train disaster.
The worst rail disaster in Britain was at Quintinshill near Gretna Green in Scotland in 1915 during the First World War in a multiple-train smash in which a troop train caught fire, killing more than 220 people



Source : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2378053/Spain-train-crash-U-S-citizen-dead-5-Americans-injured.html