Three Britons among dead in Lisbon funicular crash as wreckage removed

LISBON (Reuters) -Portuguese police said on Friday that three Britons were among the 16 killed in a funicular railway crash in Lisbon, as the mangled wreckage was removed for further analysis to establish the cause of the accident.

Portugal is reeling from a tragedy that Prime Minister Luis Montenegro described as one of the greatest in its recent history and that threatens to dent confidence in the tourism industry, which in Lisbon depends on vintage attractions such as the 140-year-old Gloria railway.

After coroners identified more bodies, police updated the list of fatalities that now includes five Portuguese citizens, three Britons, two South Koreans, two Canadians, and one from each of France, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United States.

They released no names or other details. More than 20 people were injured.

Police said that a German citizen who had been presumed dead was in fact alive in a hospital. Local media had said that a German father had died and a mother was seriously hurt while their 3-year-old child suffered minor injuries.

The German foreign ministry said at least three German nationals were in hospital.

A preliminary report on the accident will take six weeks to complete, according to Portuguese authorities. While they do not rule out any possible cause, police sources told the Publico daily there were no signs of foul play.

The crashed car's twin at the bottom of the steep 265-metre slope was also removed and will be studied by experts.

The two cars, each capable of carrying around 40 people, alternately climb the slope and descend, one helping to pull the other up, as electric motors drive the cable linking them.

That traction cable snapped, apparently at or near the connection to the bottom of the upper car, according to two experts consulted by Reuters who pored over the video footage.

Seemingly unable to check its descent, the carriage entered a sharp bend in the street too fast, ploughing into the cobblestone pavement and crashing into a building.

The municipal transport company Carris has said "all maintenance protocols have been carried out," including monthly and weekly maintenance and daily inspections, the latest just hours before the incident with no faults detected.

"We cannot assume that the problem was with the cable," Carris CEO Pedro Bogas said on Thursday.

The line connects Lisbon's downtown area near the Restauradores Square with the Bairro Alto and transports around 3 million people a year.

(Reporting by Andrei Khalip; additional reporting by Andreas Rilke; editing by Charlie Devereux, Alexandra Hudson)