Nine dead after commuter trains collide in Germany

German news agency dpa reported that one train derailed in the crash Tuesday morning, and several wagons overturned.

Hundreds of rescuers were scouring for more passengers trapped in the wreckage in a wooded area near Bad Aibling, a spa town about 60 kilometres (40 miles) southeast of Munich.

“One train really drilled itself into the second train and the driver cab of the second train has been entirely shattered”, Dobrindt said. Aerial footage shot by APTN showed that the impact tore the two engines apart, shredded metal train cars and flipped several of them on their sides off the rails.

Water police are ferrying the injured across a river to waiting ambulances and helicopters.

“The accident is a big shock for us”, said Bernd Rosenbusch, CEO of Bayerischen Oberlandbahn, the company that operates Meridian trains, in the statement.

Rescue personnel attend an injured person beside of two trains that collided head-on near Bad Aibling, southern Germany, Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2016.

“One had to assume the two train drivers had little, if any, visual contact with each other”, Dobrindt said.

He says black boxes recovered from the trains should provide more answers once analyzed. Blue, yellow and silver metal debris was strewn around the crash site next to a river in the southern state of Bavaria.

In 2011, 10 people were killed and 23 injured in a head-on collision of a passenger train and a cargo train on a single-line track close to Saxony-Anhalt’s state capital Magdeburg in eastern Germany.

The spokesman said officials had opened an investigation to establish what caused the crash of the two local passenger trains, which were operated by Meridian.

When they crashed, the trains had been traveling at speeds up to 100 km per hour – or around 62 mph, reports Deutsche Welle, citing Germany’s minister of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, Alexander Dobrindt.

CNN’s Max Foster, Stephanie Halasz, Lindsay Isaac and Damien Ward reported from London.