KAPRUN, Austria — The fire that killed up to 160 people aboard an Austrian ski train probably broke out before it entered a mountain tunnel where it was engulfed by flames, police said on Tuesday.
"Soon after the departure of the train, and before it entered the tunnel, there may have been a fault which could have a connection with the fire," police technical investigator Christian Tisch said.
Tisch said chemical analysis would be needed to identify substances — possibly a lubricant — which dripped onto the track up the Kitzsteinhorn mountain, near Salzburg in western Austria.
"They point to the train having caught fire before entering the tunnel," he told a news conference.
The investigators' findings were the first confirmation of accounts given by some of the 12 survivors of last weekend's tragedy, Austria's worst peacetime disaster.
The witnesses said they had seen smoke before the space-age train, which was meant to be fire-resistant, entered the tunnel.
Tisch said the grimy, oil-like residue found on the tracks may also have melted as a result of fire on board the single-carriage train. Results of the chemical tests could be ready in a day or two, he said.
The death train, which set out just after 9 a.m. on Saturday, climbed a steep incline for around 600 yards before entering the tunnel, where a strong updraft quickly fanned the fire into an inferno.
Major Franz Lang, the police officer leading investigations, said the probable death toll had been revised to 156 mainly Austrian and German skiers, with four other possible dead.
Nationalities of the dead, but not their names, would be published on the Internet later in the day.
Newspapers crowned German skier Erwin Goetz "the hero of Kaprun" for leading the other 11 survivors 600 meters down the steep incline to fresh air and safety.
A friend, indentified only as Torsten G., who helped Goetz persuade the others to run downhill despite the risk the train's cable would snap, said he still found it hard to talk about the "horror film" of what happened in the tunnel.
"You cannot imagine what it is like to go on a skiing holiday with 50 friends and come back with only 30," said the 37-year-old investment banker who, like most of the German victims, came from the southern town of Vilseck.
Rescue workers extracted more bodies from the two-mile tunnel overnight, bringing the total recovered to 90.
"The melting is so severe that the search teams have to separate the corpses centimeter by centimeter," Lang said.
The search for evidence continued, not just on the track but also at the valley station in the village of Kaprun and at the mountain station on the 10,500-foot Kitzsteinhorn.
Lang said three rooms in the mountain station had been sealed off, but he hastened to add that did not mean any evidence had been found which might incriminate any of the workers on the railway, all of whom were interviewed by police.
"As yet no incriminating evidence has been found and it would not be right to speculate at this stage," Lang said.
Pathologists in the nearby regional capital Salzburg began the grim task of examining the bodies, which were so badly charred by temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees Celsius that DNA tests will be needed to identify them.
"We are working flat-out on identification," Edith Tutsch-Bauer, chief pathologist at Salzburg's institute for forensic medicine, told Reuters.
She said 25 autopsies would be possible on Tuesday, but identification of all victims is expected to take up to a month.