At least 78 people were killed and more than 140 were injured when a train derailed near Santiago de Compostela in Spain on Wednesday, according to BBC News.

It is one of Spain's worst train crashes in their history. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has declared three days of national mourning. Reports stated that the train was travelling faster than it was supposed to when it took a bend. Julio Gomez Pomar, the president of the railway firm, said the train had no technical problems and had passed an inspection earlier that morning.

"Those trains are inspected every 7,500km... Its maintenance record was perfect," he told Spanish radio.

The railway firm Renfe said the train derailed on a bend about three or four kilometers from Santiago de Compostela station at 20:41 local time (18:41 GMT) on Wednesday. It as carrying 218 passengers and an unknown number of crew members on the express route from Spain's capital of Madrid to the city of Frerrol on the Galician coast.

Firefighter Jaime Tizon, one of the first to reach the site of the crash, described the scene as "hell."

"I'm coming from hell, I couldn't tell you if the engine was on fire, or one of the carriages or what..." he reportedly told ABC after dragging the injured and bodies from the train.

Another witness, Ricardo Montesco, described how the train carriages "piled on top of one another" after the train hit a curve.

"A lot of people were squashed on the bottom. We tried to squeeze out of the bottom of the wagons to get out and we realised the train was burning...I was in the second wagon and there was fire. I saw corpses," he told Spanish Cadena Ser radio station.

Numerous eyewitnesses said the train was travelling very fast before it derailed.