Police arrest two men from construction firm involved in deadly train crash

Police in north Moravia have arrested two men wanted for questioning over Friday’s horrific train accident, which cost the lives of seven people and injured dozens more. A spokeswoman for Nový Jičín police confirmed that the two – employees of a building contractors – had been arrested on Wednesday evening, but gave no further details. Investigators are working to establish the cause of the accident, in which an express train ploughed into a road bridge that had collapsed onto the rails seconds earlier.

Photo: CTK

At the time of the accident the bridge was being repaired by the Czech construction firm Dopravní Stavby Ostrava (ODS). ODS had hired a sub-contractor called Boegl & Krysl to supply the steel frame of the bridge. The director of Boegl & Krysl’s Ostrava branch confirmed to the Czech media that the two men arrested on Wednesday were the project’s overall supervisor and the superintendent responsible for moving the metal frame of the bridge.

However the firm’s director stressed that the two men were not responsible for the statics of the bridge. That, he said, was the responsibility of ODS. One version of events being examined by police is that the statics of the bridge were somehow disturbed during construction work.

Photo: CTK

The two are were simply arrested and questioned by police; they have not been charged. Police are investigating the case as endangering the general public, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

The accident happened on Friday around 10.30 am, when the Comenius express train from the Polish city of Krakov to Prague slammed into a motorway bridge that had collapsed onto the tracks in the town of Studenka, north Moravia. It soon emerged from eyewitness testimony from the driver, who survived the accident almost unharmed, that the bridge collapsed onto the rails mere seconds before the train went through the station.

Photo: CTK

The driver described seeing the bridge begin to buckle and sway. He hit the emergency brake, managing to slow the train from its speed of 135 km to 90 km, an act which almost certainly saved many lives. It was impossible to bring the train to a halt, however, and six seconds later it crashed into the wreckage of the bridge. The ensuing collision derailed the first six carriages, leaving seven people dead, five dozen injured, many seriously – seventeen are still in hospital.

Meanwhile questions are being asked about the safety of the nation’s bridges, and there’s also been a flurry of speculation about the construction site itself. People living near the crash site claim to have seen workmen buying hard alcohol, although the head of the firm categorically denied his employees had been drinking on the job.