- At least 46 dead in Greece’s worst train crash
- Railway employees leave their jobs in protest at safety standards
LARISSA, GREECE, March 2 (Portal) – Rescuers combed through charred and dented train carriages for more victims of Greece’s deadliest train crash on Thursday, a disaster that has killed at least 46 people and sparked a national outburst of grief and anger.
The high-speed passenger train with more than 350 people on board crashed head-on into a freight train near the town of Larissa late Tuesday. Cars were thrown off the tracks, completely crushing two and catching fire to several.
“The most difficult moment is when we have to recover bodies instead of saving lives,” 40-year-old rescuer Konstantinos Imanimidis told Portal at the scene of the crash, 210km north of Athens.
“With temperatures of 1,200 degrees and more in the wagons, nobody can stay alive.”
Nearby, two brothers wept and said they came to the site of the crash hoping to learn about their father, aged around 60, after the hospital could not tell them if his body had been recovered.
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Many of the passengers had to step through windows to escape the flames. In order to identify some of the victims, relatives were asked to provide DNA samples at a hospital in Larissa, where some turned disbelief to anger.
“Some bastard has to pay for this,” yelled a relative
Many of the victims were university students returning home after a long holiday weekend, and officials said the death toll was expected to continue rising. Numerous people were injured.
The tragedy sparked grief and anger across Greece, where the government has declared three days of national mourning.
Protesters threw stones at the train company’s offices in Athens in the evening before being dispersed by riot police with volleys of tear gas. Protests also broke out in Thessaloniki.
[1/5] Rescuers operate at the scene of a crash where two trains collided, near the city of Larissa, Greece, March 2, 2023. Portal/Alexandros Avramidis
And on Thursday, trains were halted in a day of strikes against successive governments’ refusal to hear repeated calls to improve safety standards.
Newly appointed Transport Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis said he was tasked with investigating the causes of the accident and modernizing infrastructure after his predecessor Kostas Karamanlis resigned over the accident on Wednesday.
INVESTIGATION
The stationmaster of Larissa train station was arrested on Wednesday as authorities investigated the circumstances that led to the passenger train en route to the northern city of Thessaloniki colliding with another train carrying shipping containers traveling on the same track in the opposite direction came.
He was due to appear before a local magistrate on Thursday.
In a televised address on Wednesday night, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who previously visited the site of the crash, said evidence pointed to human error.
Nikos Tsouridis, a retired train driver trainer, said human error doesn’t fully explain what happened.
“The stationmaster made a mistake, he acknowledged it, but there should certainly be some safety mechanism to fall back on,” he said.
Greece sold railway operator TRAINOSE to Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane as part of its international bailout program in 2017 and expects hundreds of millions of euros to be invested in rail infrastructure in the coming years.
The Italian operation is responsible for passenger and freight traffic and the state-controlled Greek OSE for the infrastructure.
Reporting by Lefteris Papadimas, Alexandros Avramidis, Renee Maltezou, Karolina Tagaris, Michele Kambas; Writing by Renee Maltezou and Ingrid Melander; Edited by John Stonestreet and Frank Jack Daniel
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