French press review 26 July 2013

Today's French papers want to know the cause of Wednesday's Spanish train crash which killed 80 with many more injured.

Friday’s front page stories resemble Siamese twins, the papers all expressing shock about the terrible accident, he deadliest recorded in Spain since 1944.

Le Figaro and Aujourd’hui en France run the same headline “Spain in state of shock”, both contemplating the high number of lives lost in the crash. Aujourd’hui en France puts the casualty figure at 80 dead, 178 injured, 94 in hospital, 32 of them in critical condition, including four children.

Le Monde reports that all the carriages of the high-speed train skidded off the railway before most of them turned over. It describes how one of the carriages flew over 15 metres before landing upside down.

While Spanish rail authorities have refused to speculate on the cause of the crash pending an investigation, business newspaper Les Echos blames the tragedy on excessive speed. It points to Spanish media reports that the train was going at twice the speed limit, when it crashed near the north-western town of Santiago de Compostela.

Libération runs excerpts of remarks made by the train driver as he was being taken to a nearby hospital with light injuries. He told rescuers the train had come off the rails and there was nothing he could do about it, adding that he hoped there were no deaths. Libé says that just a while earlier he was caught bragging on his cockpit radio that he was taking the bend at 180 kilometres per hour in an area where the speed limit is 80 km per hour.

Le Figaro is leaning towards human error as the likely cause of the crash since the train was relatively new. It says that the driver, despite being in hospital, has been placed under police surveillance while a court in the Galicia region waits to hear his version of what may have caused the crash.

L’Humanité takes a swipe at the railway company’s CEO who tried to dissociate himself from the tragedy. According to the Communist Party daily, he suggested that the train had no operational problems, having undergone a technical check on the morning of the catastrophe.

An official of the train drivers’ union told the l'Humanité that the train probably suffered break failure because the modern automatic speed control system recommended by the European rail traffic management authority had not yet been installed on the line.

Aujourd’hui en France looks at Europe’s continuing headache with train accidents, despite remarkable efforts in railway security. The deadliest crash occurred in 1998 in Germany when an inter-city train from Hamburg en route to Munich crashed, killing 101 passengers with 88 others injured. Spain’s worst tragedy in recent times dates back to 1944 when a Madrid-Galicia train collided with a locomotive killing 100 people.

It was Spain’s “train to hell”, concludes Libération, a tragedy of sorts that pilgrims met their death just four kilometres from completing one of Christianity’s most important holy missions. Libé explains that it consists of “following the Way of Saint James”, the evangelisation mission carried out in the Iberian peninsula by the apostle of Christ, the son of Zebedee and brother of John the Baptist.

Legend holds that Saint James’s remains are buried at  Santiago de Compostela and visiting his tomb helps Christians earn ”plenary indulgence”. Santiago de Compostela has been venerated since the ninth century as one of the three holy cities of Christianity, along with Rome and Jerusalem, attracting over 200,000 pilgrims from France alone every year, according to Aujourd’hui en France.