The death toll in the crash of a famous Lisbon streetcar popular with tourists rose to 17 on Thursday after two of the 23 injured people died, an emergency services official said.
The death toll in the crash of a famous Lisbon streetcar popular with tourists rose to 17 on Thursday after two of the 23 injured people died, an emergency services official said.
The dead were all adults, Margarida Castro Martins, head of Lisbon’s Civil Protection Agency, told reporters.
She didn’t provide their names or nationalities, saying that their families would be informed first.
Another 21 people were injured in Wednesday’s crash, she said.
They included Portuguese people as well as two Germans, two Spaniards and one person each from France, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, Morocco, South Korea and Cape Verde, she said.
The range of nationalities reflected how big a draw the renowned streetcar was for tourists who are packing the Portuguese capital during the summer season.
Portugal observed a national day of mourning Thursday after the capital’s worst disaster in recent history.
Though authorities gave no details about those killed, the transport workers’ trade union SITRA said that the streetcar’s brakeman, André Marques, was among the dead.
The 19th-century streetcar is one of Lisbon’s big tourist attractions and is usually packed with foreigners at this time of year for its short and picturesque trip up and down one of the city’s steep hills.
Teams of pathologists at the National Forensics Institute, reinforced by colleagues from three other Portuguese cities, worked through the night on autopsies, officials said.
