Four people have died and 26 were injured after a passenger train heading to Ukraine collided with a freight train in the Czech city of Pardubice, officials have said.
“I can confirm that four people suffered injuries incompatible with life,” local emergency spokesperson Alena Kisiala told broadcaster Czech TV.
The crash occurred on Wednesday evening in Pardubice, part of the country’s main rail corridor from Prague, about 60 km west of the town.
Czech TV reported that the train had been carrying more than 300 passengers, many of them foreigners.
Prime minister Petr Fiala offered condolences on social media platform X, saying the crash was “a great disaster” and that “we all think of the victims and the injured”.
The interior and transport ministers arrived at the site in the early hours of Thursday. Interior minister Vit Rakusan said most of the injuries were light, and that the passengers had been evacuated into the train station building.
Rakusan said that police were identifying the passengers gathered at the train station after the operator, Regiojet, had provided the passenger list.
Rescuers said that nine ambulance vans, two helicopters and more than 60 firefighters, both professional and voluntary, had been deployed.
“The rescue work was complicated because the first carriage was deformed. That made it hard to access the injured people,” firefighter Pavel Ber told reporters at the site.
The train had been heading to the western Ukrainian town of Chop close to the border with Slovakia.
The timetable shows the train leaving Prague at 1952 GMT and was due to leave Pardubice at 2047 GMT. It was expected in Chop at 0835 GMT on Thursday after crossing Slovakia.
An investigation into the cause of the accident was under way, transport minister Martin Kupka said.
He added that the main train corridor connecting Prague with the second Czech city of Brno and the third city of Ostrava would remain closed for at least several hours.
Footage after the crash on news website idnes.cz showed at least one carriage off the track, while police showed on their X social media account a line of emergency service vehicles and a helicopter.
A spokesperson for the Railway Administration’s firefighters told Czech TV several were seriously injured.
Local fire brigade spokesperson Vendula Horakova told Czech TV the freight train was transporting calcium carbide.
Pardubice was also the scene of the worst-ever Czech railway accident in 1960 when 118 people died and about 100 were injured in a head-on collision of two passenger trains just north of the city.
Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report