Thirty-five people suffered mostly minor injuries when two passenger trains crashed in the Czech capital of Prague on Wednesday morning, rescuers and rail companies said.
Police said one of the drivers tested positive for alcohol, though the rail operator argued that the other driver had likely been at fault.
“One of the trains jumped a red light and crashed into a standing train from behind,” Dusan Gavenda, a spokesman for the railway infrastructure company Sprava Zeleznic told AFP.
Prague’s emergency service said it had treated 35 patients.
“There were light and medium injuries, but no one’s life was in danger,” spokeswoman Jana Postova said.
There were “bruises and scratches but we also registered some fractures, including a jaw fracture,” she added.
Firefighters said on X they had evacuated about 200 people onto another train.
Police said one driver had a positive breathalyser test result and was taken to a doctor to undergo a blood test.
Czech Railways, the national rail operator, acknowledged that its driver had tested positive but said he probably did not cause the accident.
“According to the available information, the accident was not the fault of our train driver, but that does not make the finding any less serious,” it said on X.
Czech Railways added that it would sack the driver if the blood test confirmed he was inebriated.
The other train was operated by Czech railway company KZC, according to the Czech news agency CTK.
Train accidents are not rare in the Czech Republic, an EU member country of 10.9 million people.
In June, four people were killed and more than 20 injured when an express train crashed head-on with a freight train in the city of Pardubice, east of Prague.