00:00Sabotage and human error, false theories spread over Spain's train tragedy.
00:09Spain is ruling from back-to-back train disaster. On Sunday evening near Adamuth,
00:14three carriages from a Nereo train heading to Madrid derailed,
00:18crossing over onto the other side of the track. They collided with an outgoing Renfe train,
00:23traveling from Madrid to Huelva, causing the front carriages of that train to collapse into an
00:28embankment. Days later, another commuter train near Barcelona derailed, leaving the driver dead,
00:34and another collided with a crane in Murcia. Almost immediately after the crashes, conspiracy
00:40theories spread online. The primary claim that spread was that the crash was caused by sabotage.
00:46Users blamed Russia and even Israel for this. Spanish fact-checkers at Maltida pointed to a viral
00:52tweet that compared the crash with damaged trucks in Poland last year, which was linked to Russian
00:57sabotage. This theory exploded online in multiple languages and was pushed by Elon Musk's chatbot
01:04Grok, which although mostly saying that sabotage had been ruled out, also falsely claimed that
01:09Spanish transport minister Oscar Puente had suggested foul play. The cause of the Adamuth crash is unknown,
01:16but investigators have ruled out both sabotage and human error, with a probe focusing on a
01:21rail joint found fractured near a track switch. Other false narratives claim that Spain diverted millions
01:28of rail funding abroad instead of maintaining its domestic tracks, particularly to Morocco and
01:33Uzbekistan. In reality, these are repayable loans tied to exports by Spanish companies not linked to the
01:40ministry of the ministry of transport.
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