A German man who had been presumed dead in the Lisbon funicular accident has been found alive.
The 46-year-old man was with his three-year-old son and his wife at the time of the accident.
BarcelonaThe father of a three-year-old boy rescued from the wreckage of the Gloria funicular railway in Lisbon has appeared alive, despite German authorities having informed the family of his death. After hours of searching at several hospitals, the family located the injured 46-year-old man at the São José Hospital in the Portuguese capital.
According to CNN Portugal, the family—originally from Hamburg—had been referred to the Forensic Medical Institute after receiving news of his death. However, when they arrived, they were unable to identify him among the bodies. When they showed his photograph to a police officer again, he accompanied them to a hospital, where an as yet unidentified German man had been admitted, who turned out to be him.
The boy was traveling with his parents when the funicular derailed, leaving at least 16 dead and more than 20 injured. After the accident, an emergency services worker rescued the child from the wreckage and handed him over to Antonio, a tuk-tuk driver who had arrived at the scene. "The child was very scared, clinging tightly to my neck and crying. He kept shouting for his father," Antonio recounted in an interview with German television station RTL.
The child's mother was also injured and remains in critical but stable condition at Lisbon's Santa Maria Hospital.
Following the accident, the German Foreign Ministry confirmed that German citizens were among the victims. The head of the Portuguese criminal police, Luis Neves, also initially indicated that one of the deceased was a German national. However, in a later statement, the judicial police reversed themselves and admitted that "the German citizen identified on Thursday as one of the fatalities was hospitalized at São José Hospital."
Although the investigation is preliminary, initial hypotheses about the accident point to the breakage of one of the two safety cables of the popular elevator, which connects Praça dos Restauradores in central Lisbon with Jardim de São Pedro de Alcântara in Bairro Alto.