The unrest caused by the train crash that left at least 47 dead on Tuesday night in central Greece is beginning to be reflected in the streets. Hundreds of demonstrators protested last night in front of the offices of the Hellenic Train railway company in Athens, responsible for the maintenance of the tracks in Greece. There were several altercations when a group of them threw Molotov cocktails at the police, who responded with tear gas.
There have also been protests in the cities of Thessaloniki, where the crashed passenger train was heading, and in the city of Larisa, near the crash site. The death toll has already risen to 47 people, most of them young students returning home after a long weekend, but the toll is feared to be even worse.
The firefighters are working this Thursday on the third of the derailed wagons, where the last lifeless bodies were removed yesterday. “It will be very difficult to find survivors, due to the temperatures that were in the wagons,” Constantinos Imamidis, a member of the rescue teams, acknowledged to the Reuters agency. “It’s the hardest thing: instead of saving lives, we’re digging to find bodies.” Some sixty people are still hospitalized, six of them in intensive care, all young people under 26 years of age.
The railway employee unions have announced a 24-hour strike on Thursday to protest the poor state of the sector, denouncing the “chronic lack of respect shown by the different governments”, which in their opinion has caused an accident that has also caused more than 80 injuries, being the worst in the last decade in Europe. They denounce that they have spent years demanding that security standards be improved, and that they have been ignored by successive executives.
So far, the only detainee is the Larisa station manager, a 59-year-old man accused of negligent homicide. He has acknowledged in interrogations that he made a mistake when he placed the night passenger train running the Athens-Thessaloniki route on the same track as the freight train he violently collided with, and that it was doing the reverse route. The employee will testify this Thursday in a Larisa court and, apparently, would have alleged fatigue due to a high workload. If he is found guilty, he could face between ten years in jail and life in prison.
“And why were there no security measures?” asked Nikos Tsouridis, a retired train conductor. “The station manager made a mistake, he has recognized it, but there should be security mechanisms to prevent it,” he stressed. In 2017, Greece sold rail operator TRAINOSE to Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato, expecting hundreds of millions of euros to be invested in its rail infrastructure.
The accident has also caused the resignation of the Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, Kostas Karamanlis, who assumed responsibility. “We will work so that words never again are not an empty promise. I can assure you of this,” said the Prime Minister, the conservative Kyriakos Mitsotakis, from the scene of the tragedy.
