More than 50 dead in Spanish train wreck

At least 56 people were killed and more than 70 injured when a train derailed on the outskirts of the northern Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela in one of Europe's worst rail disasters.

Bodies covered in blankets lay next to the overturned carriages as smoke billowed from the wreckage after the Wednesday crash. Firemen clambered over the twisted metal trying to get survivors out of the windows. 

The head of Spain's Galicia region, Alberto Nunez Feijoo, told local television that 56 people were dead and 70 were injured, 20 of them seriously. The train was carrying 247 people. "The scene is shocking, it's Dante-esque," Feijoo said.

Train wagons lay on their sides with smoke billowing from the wreckage, photographs published on the Voz de Galicia newspaper website showed.

"It was going so quickly ... It seems that on a curve the train started to twist, and the wagons piled up one on top of the other," passenger Ricardo Montesco told Cadena Ser radio station.

"A lot of people were squashed on the bottom. We tried to squeeze out of the bottom of the wagons to get out and we realized the train was burning ... I was in the second wagon and there was fire ... I saw corpses," he added.

Another witness told the station they had heard an explosion before seeing the derailed train.

Santiago de Compostela, the birthplace of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, is best known as the destination of an ancient Catholic pilgrimage route.

Wire services