“This is most likely an individual human error. It is not a technical failure or a system breakdown,” Transport Minister Jozef Raz told reporters on Friday. He was referring to the collision between a passenger train and a bus that killed seven people and injured five others on Thursday. “The train should not have been on that track,” he said, explaining that it had been closed for repairs following heavy rains in the previous days.
The accident occurred shortly after 5:00 p.m. local time (3:00 p.m. GMT) on Thursday at a level crossing near the town of Nove Zamky in the southwest of the country. It left seven people dead and five injured, according to a new report provided overnight from Thursday to Friday by the Slovak emergency services, which had previously reported six dead and five injured.
Upon impact, parts of the coach scattered and the Eurocity train linking Prague to Budapest caught fire. Railway spokesperson Vladimira Bahylova told AFP on Thursday that the train driver “suffered burns because the locomotive caught fire” during the impact with the bus.
Local media published a video showing passengers next to a partially burning train, as thick grey smoke rose into the sky. One passenger, Katarina Molnarova, told AFP she “felt and heard a shock and a bang” as the train left Nove Zamky station.
“After a few minutes we were able to go down,” said the 43-year-old beautician from the southern town of Sturovo. “We saw that the front part of the train was on fire,” she continued. “There was no screaming or panic (…) We took our luggage and walked to the road (…) I saw parts of the bus that had been scattered during the the impact,” she said.
The collision is the fourth fatal accident at a level crossing in Slovakia this year, according to local news agency TASR. In a similar collision in 2009, 12 people were killed on board a bus that collided with a regional train at a level crossing near the village of Polomka (central Slovakia).
