Prosecutor: Dispatcher played video games before deadly German train crash

A train dispatcher was playing video games on his mobile phone until just before two commuter trains collided head-on in southern Germany in February, killing 11 people, the public prosecutor's office says.

The unidentified 39-year-old signal controller, who was taken into custody Tuesday, admitted playing the game on his cellphone "but denied being distracted by this," Chief Public Prosecutor Wolfgang Giese said in a statement, Süddeutsche Zeitung reports.

The prosecutor's statement calls the dispatcher's actions a "dereliction of duty," not merely a "temporary failure." He faces a charge of negligent homicide.

At the moment of impact, the two commuter trains — carrying 150 people — were hurtling toward each other on a curved track at about 62 mph, according to German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt. The Feb. 9 crash occurred in the southern German state of Bavaria, in a wooded area about 35 miles southeast of Munich near the spa town of Bad Aibling.

Giese, of the public prosecutor's office in Traunstein, says investigators found that the signal controller, in violation of the railway work rules, "switched on his mobile phone during his shift on the morning of the accident, started an online computer game and played actively for an extended period of time until shortly before the collision.”

Based on the timing, Giese says, "one must assume that the attention of the accused was diverted from regulating the (railway) traffic,” Reuters reports.

The dispatcher initially erred by putting the two trains on a collision course, then compounded the mistake while attempting to send a distress signal, according to Süddeutsche Zeitung.

“Because of this distraction, the accused made some false assumptions about where the trains might cross, gave the wrong signals to the trains and entered a wrong key combination for an emergency call to the trains, so that the drivers never heard those signals,” Giese says.