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Three Brits have been declared dead in the Lisbon funicular disaster. The crash, which left 22 people injured, five of them seriously, happened at around 6pm on Wednesday.
So far, the nationalities of 11 of the people who died have been released by the authorities. They include five people from Portugal, two Koreans, one person from Switzerland, and three from Great Britain. All the dead were adults, Margarida Castro Martins, head of the agency, told reporters. She did not provide their identities, saying their families would be informed first.
All but one of the fatalities were declared dead at the scene.
The first victim of the disaster to be named was Andre Marques, the streetcar’s brakeman, the transport workers’ trade union Sitra said.
Among the injured are Spaniards, Israelis, Portuguese, Brazilians, Italians and French people, the executive director of Portugal’s national health service, Alvaro Santos Almeida, said.
Felicity Ferriter, a 70-year-old British tourist, had just arrived with her husband at a hotel near the crash site and was unpacking her suitcase when she heard “a horrendous crash”.
“We heard it, we heard the bang,” she told The Associated Press outside her hotel.
The couple had seen the streetcar when they arrived and intended to ride on it the next day.
“It was to be one of the highlights of our holiday,” she said. “It could have been us.”
She said the emergency response was “amazing”, and that police and ambulances had quickly “flooded in”.
Lisbon hosted around 8.5 million tourists last year, and long lines of people typically form for the streetcar’s short and picturesque trip a few hundred metres up and down a city street.
“This tragedy… goes beyond our borders,” Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said at his official residence, calling it “one of the biggest tragedies of our recent past”. Portugal observed a national day of mourning Thursday.
All 16 post-mortem examinations were concluded on Thursday, but the identification of three victims required access to dental records or family DNA that were held abroad, Francisco Corte-Real, the head of the national forensic medicine institute, told a joint news conference.
The electric streetcar, also known as a funicular, is harnessed by steel cables and can carry more than 40 people. On Thursday, officials took photographs and pulled up cable from beneath the rails that climb one of the Portuguese capital’s steep hills.
Officials declined to comment on whether a faulty brake or a snapped cable may have prompted the descending streetcar to careen into a building where the road bends.
“The city needs answers,” Lisbon mayor Carlos Moedas said in a televised statement, adding that talk of possible causes is “mere speculation”.
The service, inaugurated in 1885, runs between Restauradores Square and the Bairro Alto neighbourhood, renowned for its nightlife. The Elevador da Gloria is classified as a national monument.
Lisbon’s city council halted operations of three other famous funicular streetcars in the city while immediate inspections were carried out.
European Union flags at the European Parliament and European Commission in Brussels flew at half-staff. Multiple EU leaders expressed their condolences on social media.
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