Train wreck could hide more corpses, investigators say

The wreckage of the trains whose collision south of Brussels on Monday killed 18 people could still hide more corpses, investigators told the German Press Agency dpa a day after the crash.

The rush hour crash is already the deadliest to hit Belgium in a generation, but officials in the Brussels prosecutor's office said that more bodies could still come to light as the arduous task of clearing the wreckage began.

"I cannot exclude that we might find more corpses in the course of the salvage operation," a spokesman for the prosecutor's office, which is charged with heading the investigation into the crash, told dpa.

Several families have reported missing relatives following the crash, but it was not clear whether those missing people were in the trains which crashed, he said.

At least 18 people died in the crash at rush hour on Monday morning, and an estimated 80 were injured, 20 of them severely.

"Other figures are too high," the spokesman said. Media reports on Tuesday spoke of up to 160 people hurt.