The Larisa prosecutor’s office has charged the head of the train station in this Greek city with “negligent homicide” and other crimes punishable by between ten years in prison and life imprisonment.
The defendant, 59, is charged with the alleged commission of serial “negligent homicide” and causing bodily harm, in addition to a felony for disturbing the safety of transportation traffic resulting in the death of several people.
According to the Greek media, the railway employee already admitted on Wednesday, after being arrested, his responsibility for the mistake that placed a passenger train with 342 passengers and 10 crew members on the same track as a freight train with two machinists.
The Greek public railway sector is in the spotlight and government spokesman Yannis Oikonomou admitted “chronic weaknesses”.
“The delays (in the modernization of the railways) are due to the chronic pathologies of the Greek public sector, to decades of weakness,” he told a press conference.
Dozens of firefighters have continued their work to search for survivors, while the latest death toll has already risen to 47. Another 57 people remain hospitalized, six of them in intensive care. Most of the victims were young university students returning to Thessaloniki after a festive long weekend.
The authorities have asked relatives of the travelers to provide DNA tests since many of the bodies recovered are so burned that they cannot be identified in any other way.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Wednesday that “the tragedy, unfortunately, is due above all to human error.”
The president of the train drivers’ union, Kostas Geridunias, denounced on ERT public television the state of deterioration of the railway line that connects the two largest cities in Greece.
“Nothing works, everything is done manually, we are in manual mode on the entire Athens Thessaloniki axis. Traffic lights don’t work either. If they did, drivers would see red lights and stop on time,” he said.
For these reasons, train drivers depend almost entirely on the information they receive from station managers, without an automated system that alerts them to possible errors.
Meanwhile, the railway employee unions have announced a 24-hour strike this Thursday due to the deterioration of the sector and to criticize that the only detainee is an employee of the state train company.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
