Alton Towers denies 'full pace collision' on Sonic Spinball ride

An eyewitness told reporters that four people were injured, but the park has called the claims "inaccurate"

Alton Towers as denied claims that the Sonic Spinball crashed on Tuesday (Christopher Furlong/Getty Image)

Alton Towers has denied claims that guests were involved in a collision on the Sonic Spinball ride at the theme park which reportedly left four people injured.

An eyewitness reportedly told The Mirror the guests were hurt when two carriages knocked into one another “at full pace” on the ride on Tuesday at around 2:30pm.

The theme park however has denied the claim, and insisted that the two cars "nudged each other at walking pace."

Danny Robinson, 24, from Liverpool, claimed in an interview with the newspaper that his friends "hit the back of their heads" and "another two hurt their necks."

Twitter user @AmieJohno from Wirral wrote on the website that she was on the Sonic Spinball when her "carriage crashed into another one"

"Safe to say I won’t be going again!" she said.

A spokeswoman for the theme park owned by Merlin Entertainments told The Independent that there was no such crash on Tuesday, and it therefore did not happen at speed as Mr Robinson described.

She called reports “inaccurate and completely misleading.”

The theme park said in a statement: “Alton Towers Resort puts the health and safety of its guests at the forefront of everything it does, which means that from time to time rides will be closed to allow for technical issues to be reviewed. All rides are performing exactly as they are designed to do – including computer and process controlled shut downs which do happen.

“There has been an instance of this on Sonic Spinball. Two cars in the station area nudged each other at walking pace. The guests on the two cars walked off and we advised that they attend our medical centre as a precautionary measure. The ride reopened shortly afterwards.”

The theme park has been under the spotlight after 16 guests were involved in a serious collision on The Smiler ride last month.

Some four park guests were left with serious injuries after a carriage packed with guests crashed into an empty carrier on 2 June.

Vicky Balch, 20, and Leah Washington, 17, were among the most seriously injured after the tragic accident, and have both had parts of their legs amputated.

Reports of the alleged incident emerged as Alton Towers was forced to apologise after passengers were trapped on a broken-down monorail for an hour on the hottest day of the year.

A park spokeswoman said: “In order to try and keep the evacuation of the 80 guests as simple as possible the decision was taken to move the trains to the nearest evacuation platforms.

“This took around half an hour for one train and a further 30 minutes for the second.”