ROME — Two passenger trains collided head-on in the Puglia region of southern Italy on Tuesday morning, killing at least 25 people and injuring dozens more, some of them critically.
The crash occurred around 11:30 a.m. on a single track running through an olive grove between the towns of Andria and Ruvo di Puglia. The closest major city is Bari, about 20 miles east of Ruvo di Puglia.
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who was attending the opening of a new science museum in Milan, announced that he would return immediately to Rome and ordered an investigation. He later visited the site of the crash, the news agency ANSA reported.
“We won’t stop until we clarify what happened,” he told reporters in Milan. “There is an absolute need to understand who is responsible and to shed total light” on what happened, he said.
Mr. Renzi sent the infrastructure and transportation minister, Graziano Delrio, and the head of the civil protection agency, Fabrizio Curcio, who oversees emergency response in Italy, to the site of the crash. “It’s an incident of enormous proportions,” Mr. Delrio said when he reached the scene on Tuesday afternoon, adding that the crash was “very violent.”
The circumstances that led to the collision were unclear. A team of inspectors from the transportation ministry will work with local prosecutors to determine the cause, officials said.
Teams of rescuers worked through the afternoon to separate the two trains, extricating victims and searching for survivors in the intense July heat. One exhausted policeman, who appeared barely able to walk, was escorted from the scene by another officer.
“It’s so horrible,” a woman who survived the crash told a local television channel, Telesveva, in an interview. “I don’t know how it happened, but in a second, my husband was suddenly two meters away from me.”
The woman, whom Telesveva did not identify, described seeing body parts strewn on the ground, and said she had had to step over them barefoot to get away from the crash after pulling her husband free of the wreckage. “I could do nothing for them,” she said.