Poland mourns victims of train disaster

WARSAW: Poland began two days of mourning Monday for 16 people killed in its worst rail disaster in two decades, as investigators probing the cause of Saturday's crash detained two station masters.

A prosecutor told AFP the station officials were responsible for scheduling the doomed trains, which crashed head on as they travelled on the same section of track at Szczekociny, some 200 kilometres (120 miles) from Warsaw.

No charges have been brought against the men, the prosecutor said.

Fifty people were still in hospital Monday, three of them in a serious condition.

Meanwhile, crash investigators have identified a Russian citizen among the victims, the second foreign national killed in the crash.

"Her body was identified today," Katarzyna Kuczynska, a spokeswoman for local authorities told AFP Monday. An American woman was also among the victims.

A spokesman for the US consulate in the southern Polish city of Krakow told AFP Monday the American woman's family had been informed, but declined to provide further details.

Nationals of Ukraine, Moldova and the Czech Republic were reported to be among the injured.

French and Spanish citizens were among the around 350 passengers on the trains when they collided at around 9:00 pm (2000 GMT) on Saturday, but apparently escaped unscathed.

The massive impact hurled three carriages and both locomotives off the tracks, leaving them piled high on top of each other in a mass of tangled steel.

According to Transport Minister Slawomir Nowak, the crash occurred on a stretch of railway line that had recently been modernised.

The disaster came as Poland is hurriedly revamping its communist-era rail and road infrastructure ahead of the Euro 2012 football championships, which it is co-hosting with Ukraine from June 8.