Driver blamed for train crash

Funerals were held across Montenegro on today for the victims of Monday’s train crash that killed 44 people and injured nearly 200 others.

In Podgorica, the capital of the tiny Balkan republic, long processions of weeping relatives walked slowly behind wooden coffins – including a few tiny caskets for the youngest victims of the deadly accident, one of the deadliest in Europe in recent decades.

Preliminary investigations indicated that the train driver may have failed to lock the brakes after he left his seat to make an unspecified repair. That set the train in motion without him in the driver’s seat.

“The tragedy was made worse because many children were on the train,” Montenegro’s President Filip Vujanovic said today before attending several funerals at the main Podgorica cemetery and urged his tiny republic of 650,000 people to “do our best to help the injured and the victims’ families.”

At least 300 passengers, many of them schoolchildren returning from a ski trip, were believed to have been on the train travelling Monday from Montenegro’s mountainous north down to the coastal city of Bar, when it suddenly ran out of control and derailed into a 100 meter-(330 foot) deep ravine.

At least 5 children were among the killed and 32 among the 198 injured, many still in critical condition.

Investigators believe a “human factor” was behind the disaster because “the train was in perfect condition,” said Ilija Lubarda of Montenegro Railways after examining the wreckage at the bottom of the steep Moraca River Canyon just north of Podgorica.

The driver sustained injuries in the crash and remains under policy custody in the hospital, but his lawyer on Wednesday said he was not responsible for the fatal accident.

Dragana Vujovic said that her client, Slobodan Drobnjak, “undertook all measures to stop the train” after noticing a malfunction in its braking system.

Drobnjak “immediately contacted the main railway operation centre in Podgorica ... and briefly stepped out of the train to try to activate the external hand brakes.”

When that failed, the driver jumped back on the train “although he knew it could mean certain death,” the lawyer said and protested against “any hasty conclusions that the train driver did not follow security procedures.”

Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic also attended the funerals in Podgorica and then more than a dozen in Bijelo Polje, the northern town of some 35,000 people that was hardest hit as some 24 of its residents were crushed to death.

World Health Organisation representative in Serbia-Montenegro, Dorit Nitzan, arrived here to offer her organisation’s assistance in the aftermath of the crash.

She praised local rescue teams for their swift response in evacuating and caring for the injured and said that, following an assessment of needs by Montenegro’s Health Ministry, WHO “will try to help as much as possible.”