Abel Esteves, 75, who was with his wife and grandson, told how the street car in Lisbon picked up speed and then derailed before hitting a building with a “loud bang”
A passenger has told how he feared his wife and grandson were “going to die” when the street car derailed and crashed in Lisbon.
Portugal’s attorney general’s office said eight victims have been identified so far following the tragedy which took place just after 6pm on Wednesday, where 16 people were killed and 21 left injured. Five Portuguese, two South Koreans and a Swiss person are those that authorities have now confirmed to have died while the head of the national investigative police, Luís Neves, said there is a “high possibility” that the victims also include two Canadians, an American, a German and a Ukrainian.
Three others have not yet been identified. An investigation is underway into what Portugal’s Prime Minister Luis Montenegro has described as “one of the biggest tragedies of our recent past.”
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The sides and top of the yellow-and-white streetcar, known as Elevador da Gloria, were crumpled and it appeared to have crashed into a building where the road bends.
Abel Esteves, 75, was with his wife and grandson in the lower street car and he has now told how he watched the carriage hurtle towards them before suddenly derailing.
“I told my wife: ‘We’re all going to die here’,” he said, speaking to NoticiasaoMinuto. “It picked up a brutal speed, took a slight turn and hit the building with a loud bang.”
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”. She said: “We heard it, we heard the bang.”
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, adding: “It could have been us.”
Witness Teresa d’Avó told Portuguese television channel SIC that it looked like the streetcar had no brakes. “It hit the building with brutal force and fell apart like a cardboard box,” she said, describing how passers-by scattered into the middle of the nearby Avenida da Liberdade, or Freedom Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare.
Francesca di Bello, a 23-year-old Italian tourist on a family vacation, had been on the Elevador da Gloria just hours before the derailment. She walked by the crash site, expressing shock at the wreckage. Asked if she would ride a funicular again in Portugal or elsewhere, Ms Di Bello was emphatic: “Definitely not.”
So far Sandra Coelho, Alda Matias, Ana Lopes and Pedro Trinidade as well as the vehicle’s brakeman André Marques, all from Portugal, have been named by local media as being among the dead.
Official details about the crash in downtown Lisbon are still scant, but information is beginning to emerge about those killed in the accident. The first investigative report examining what caused the popular Lisbon tourist attraction to crash was expected to be released later today.