Three people were killed in a TER accident on Tuesday morning October 12 in Ciboure, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, and a fourth was seriously injured. The Bayonne public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into the causes of death which has been entrusted to the public security of Bayonne, the direction of the judicial police and the air and border police of Hendaye.
An impact “impossible to avoid”
TER 866460 left Hendaye station at 4:46 am Tuesday morning for Bordeaux Saint-Jean. He passed the Saint-Jean-de-Luz – Ciboure station a few minutes later, shortly after 5 hours. About 500 meters further, in the town of Ciboure, the train passed in an area that the Bayonne prosecutor, Jérôme Bourrier, described as “lacking public lighting and difficult to access by road”. According to initial findings, the train was traveling at 92 km / h.
While the day was not yet up, the driver told investigators he had “saw several individuals who obviously were not moving on the track and who were probably lying”, relates the prosecutor. Corn “he saw them at the very last moment”, To “pressed the alert button which allows emergency braking of the train but this train stopped after 310 meters”.
“Given the circumstances of this tragedy, it was absolutely impossible to avoid the impact between the TER train and the victims who were found at the scene”, says the prosecutor. Nevertheless, technical verifications are still underway, in particular on the use of the train’s graphic tapes which contain all the information on the train’s journey in memory.
Three people dead, only one formally identified victim
“The identification work is complicated”, warns the prosecutor Jérôme Bourrier, calling for the information that will follow with “a lot of caution”. Of the three people who died, only one has been identified “for sure” by comparing his fingerprints with the Spanish files. This is a 21-year-old young man who had been the subject of an expulsion case in Spain.
The investigators did “no certainty” on the identity of the two other deceased victims. The prosecutor specifies that a “a number of administrative documents were found at the scene” but that they do not make it possible to identify with certainty the victims, in particular because the documents correspond to five identities while there are only four victims in total, including the survivor. Further verifications are in progress.
A fourth victim whose vital prognosis is no longer engaged
The accident left a fourth victim, who sustained serious injuries to the legs and pelvis. At first, his vital prognosis was engaged, but it is no longer Tuesday afternoon, announces the prosecutor. This victim must be operated on during the afternoon. The emergency services had indicated earlier in the day that it was a 28-year-old man. He was transported to the Bayonne hospital center.
The privileged migrant hypothesis, according to the prosecutor
Despite some precautions, the prosecutor confirms that the most likely hypothesis is that they are migrants “who sought to enter the national territory irregularly”. He affirms that, “Obviously, all the victims would be of Algerian nationality and that three of them would have been the subject of proceedings for the irregularity of their stay on Spanish territory”.
Asked about the presence of migrants on the tracks during a press conference, the prosecutor specifies that he “It is quite frequent that certain people circulate on the SNCF tracks, what is much more astonishing here is that it seems that these people were lying down”. Jerome Bourrier “deducted” that the four victims were undoubtedly resting on the tracks, since the last train had passed around 10:30 pm and that this TER was the first train of the day.