Spain's transport minister refuses to resign after high-speed rail collision kills at least 69

On Friday, in a Madrid news conference room, Spain's transport minister Óscar Puente said he had nothing to hide and would not resign. Two days earlier, a state-operated Renfe high-speed train had slammed into the back of a stationary train run by the Iryo company near the town of Urda, in Toledo province. At least 69 people are dead.

The collision happened on Wednesday morning. Many more people were injured. A preliminary report from transport investigators, released late on Thursday, found the Renfe train was travelling between 160km/h and 200km/h at impact. Its front carriage became embedded in the tail of the Iryo train. It is being described as one of the worst rail disasters in modern European history, and it is Spain's deadliest crash since 2013.

Puente said a computer failure at about 08:30 that morning caused six moving trains to be halted, including the two that later collided. Audio recordings leaked to Spanish media add to the picture. Three recordings of exchanges between Madrid's control centre and two drivers appear to show one high-speed train being cleared to move even though another had stalled on the track about 25km ahead. Puente has called the decision to send the trains on again, without speed restrictions, "inexplicable".

The leak itself has drawn criticism. Alberto Ibáñez, a member of Congress for the left-wing Sumar platform, wrote on X that publishing the recordings was "despicable". Irene Montero, the prime ministerial candidate for Podemos, argued that responsibility should not fall on a single worker, and said drivers and experts have warned for years against liberalising the railway sector. Puente said he was "not going to use any worker as a shield", though he added that if the investigation shows human error, the government will act accordingly.

The pressure on him is considerable. The trade union CSIF called for his resignation earlier in the week, and the conservative People's Party has since joined it. Demonstrators gathered outside the transport ministry on Wednesday night. Puente's answer was blunt: "The easy thing for me would be to leave, but neither that fits with my character nor is it what the Prime Minister has asked me to do." He said he felt immense pain and sadness for victims and relatives, but could not let it paralyse him. "My duty right now," he said, is to resolve the problem rather than debate his own position.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said earlier on Friday that public trust in Spain's high-speed network had been broken. He repeated that it was "unacceptable" to have two similar tragedies within a year. In January, a collision on the same Madrid-Seville route killed 46 people in Adamuz, in southern Spain.

The country is observing three days of mourning. Among the dead are a 24-year-old athlete and a former government minister, but many families are still waiting for word about their relatives. Esther San Emeterio, whose 54-year-old brother Pepe is missing, told reporters in Toledo that officials were keeping families in "uncertainty". "We went to bed crying, outraged and full of shame," she said. "How can they keep us like this?"

What comes next rests on the investigation. Puente says he wants to take the many open questions one by one, and its findings on whether human error was involved will shape how far accountability reaches.