00:00Sabotage and human error. False theory 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
00:27into an embankment. Days later, another commuter train near Barcelona derailed,
00:33leaving the driver dead, and another collided with a crane in Murcia.
00:37Almost immediately after the crashes, conspiracy theories spread online.
00:42The primary claim that spread was that the crash was caused by sabotage.
00:46Users blamed Russia and even Israel for this.
00:49Spanish fact-checkers at Maltida pointed to a viral tweet that compared the crash
00:54with damaged trucks in Poland last year, which was linked to Russian sabotage.
00:58This theory exploded online in multiple languages and was pushed by Elon Musk's chatbot Grok,
01:04which although mostly saying that sabotage had been ruled out,
01:08also falsely claimed that Spanish transport minister Oscar Puente had suggested foul play.
01:14The cause of the Adamuth crash is unknown, but investigators have ruled out both sabotage
01:19and human error, with a probe focusing on a rail joint found fractured near a track switch.
01:24Other false narratives claim that Spain diverted millions of rail,
01:29funding abroad instead of maintaining its domestic tracks, particularly to Morocco and Uzbekistan.
01:34In reality, these are repayable loans tied to exports by Spanish companies,
01:39not linked to the Ministry of Transport.
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