Francisco José Garzón Amo, the engineer who on July 24, 2013 drove the Alvia train that derailed in Santiago de Compostela, leaving 80 dead and 144 injured, and Andrés Cortabitarte, the former Adif traffic safety director at the time of the accident , have closed the trial for the accident this Thursday with total silence and with final reports from their defenses focused on diverting responsibilities to the contrary.
The trial has been seen for sentencing after almost ten months of sessions in the City of Culture of Galicia, although the sentence will still be extended in time. Judicial sources point out that it is expected to be ready in the spring of 2024, already close to the eleventh anniversary of the incident. The judge, Elena Fernández Currás, has an intense job ahead of her to review hours of recordings of the hearing, more than 70,000 summary pages and 200 separate pieces. Just before closing the hearing, she has said that she hopes “to measure up”.
The final session took place without surprises in the planned script, although it was striking that both defendants did not make use of their right to the last word. Both are accused of 80 crimes of homicide and 145 of injuries due to serious professional negligence and one of damages, although in the final stretch of the trial, at the time of its final conclusions, the prosecutor in the case, Mario Piñeiro, decided to withdraw his accusation. against Cortabitarte. The rest of the accusations request for both four years in prison and disqualification while their defenses request their free acquittal and the prosecutor only accuses the driver.
The driver’s lawyer, Manuel Prieto, asked for his acquittal or, alternatively, that he be applied the mitigating factors of confession, reparation for the damage and undue delays because the facts attributed to him, -he was driving at 199 km/h when he answered a call of 100 seconds that the auditor did to the corporate mobile phone, he was confused that he had to reduce it to 80 and ended up derailing to 179.38- “they do not constitute a crime”.
The “negligence” is attributed by this lawyer to Adif, through Andrés Cortabitarte, and criticizes that this public company has built a story with “bias” against the driver. His client is “a Renfe worker” who “did not commit any imprudence and, much less, serious imprudence”, and he believes that the cause of the accident was the “lack of risk analysis and mitigation”, “lack of signaling” in the curve of the accident and a “deficient” performance in terms of the maximum speed chart followed by the driver and his training.
Adif “had the duty of guarantor of railway safety” and, however, “neither evaluated nor managed the intolerable risk” before the “foreseeable” human error of any driver. In an intervention of more than two hours with short breaks due to a sore throat, Prieto insisted that the danger of the A Grandeira curve “was a clamor” and posed an “intolerable” risk attributable to Adif. “They had all the security measures in place to avoid a catastrophic outcome and they didn’t,” he said.
Cortabitarte’s defense lawyer, Ignacio Sánchez González, opened the hearing ensuring that his client “has not omitted any obligation that derives from his position”, “has not infringed any duty of care” and “has observed the norms and standards in the sector railway” and that none of the accusations that ask for his conviction “has been able to specify any non-compliance”.
Placing all the blame on the other defendant, he maintains that “the accident is self-explanatory with the driver’s conduct” and that “no criminal reproach is warranted by any of the other conducts beyond the driver’s driving.” And he reproaches the rest of the accusations, which have focused on his client, considering him “a kind of Cid Campeador of the entire railway system.”
This lawyer considers that this session puts an end to a “hyperbolic process” in which the accusations “have twisted the facts to situate Mr. Cortabitarte in them” while “the conduct that is reproached is still being sought.” He also remembered the victims of this accident, who “have been doubly victims” because “they have seen how the process was unnecessarily lengthened in search of that villain who accompanied the driver in the trial.”
As has happened almost without a break since the start of the trial on October 5, 2022, a group of victims of the accident gathered outside the City of Culture of Galicia, who have received Cortabitarte between shouts and, on this occasion , have focused their indignation on the State lawyers, Adela Álvarez and Javier Suárez. They called them “liars”, “scoundrels” and “psychopaths”. Upon leaving, they again called Adif’s position “liar” and “sold” and the lawyers who have “blood-stained hands” and are “lawyers without morals.”
Coinciding with the end of the trial, the victims’ platform has insisted on the responsibility of the charge of Adif accused, understanding that “throughout the trial technical and regulatory breaches have been proven”, especially by the only two experts independent of the process, the judicial César Mariñas and the witness-expert Christopher Carr, former head of security of the European Railway Agency (ERA).
The victims regret that “the State machinery has tried to delay this trial as long as possible”, the “unexpected last-minute twist in the script” by the prosecutor and the “cynical attitude” of the State Attorney’s Office, which “has generated even more pain, if possible, to the victims in this process” and he had “the cynicism to speak of parallel trials” when “we all know that it was the Administration that contaminated public opinion, filtering the audio of the cut driver, and condemning him from Different areas”.
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