At least 57 people were killed in a train accident in Greece, and a railway worker has been arrested pending trial. On Sunday, when violence broke out between police and demonstrators in Athens, a 59-year-old man was arrested. After a passenger train and freight carrier collided head-on on the Athens-Thessaloniki route late on the evening of February 28, thousands of people gathered in the city to demand stricter safety regulations.
Greece’s anonymity laws prevent us from identifying the stationmaster in the central city of Larissa, where the derailment occurred. Many counts of endangering human life and obstructing transportation have been filed against him. The publication eKathimerini claims that a life sentence is possible for the transport safety accusation. “for approximately 20 terrible minutes he was accountable for the safety of the entire of central Greece,” his lawyer Stefanos Pantzartzidis claimed. Pantzartzidis has argued in the past that his client was upset and had taken responsibility “proportionate to him,” but he has not elaborated on what those other reasons could have been. Workers on Greece’s train network complain of shaky service as a result of years of underinvestment and cost reduction during the country’s crippling debt crisis, which lasted from 2010 to 2018.
Although Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis first placed the blame on human error, he later admitted that decades of neglect may have had a role in the accident. As prime minister, he “owes an apology to everyone, but most of all the family of the victims,” he said on Facebook. Liabilities will be determined after a swift investigation by the legal system. Unions representing railroad employees have complained for years about the lack of a functioning remote monitoring and signaling system. They want the government to set a deadline for enforcing safety measures. According to Mitsotakis, “it would have been, in practice, unthinkable for the disaster to happen” if a remote system had been in place. Over ten thousand people showed up on Sunday to the vast esplanade in front of parliament in Athens to mourn the victims and call for increased train safety. Protesters chanted, “That crime won’t be forgotten,” as they released black balloons into the air. Their policies are deadly,” the sign proclaimed.
The majority of those killed in the collision were college students returning after a weekend away. Among the dead were at least nine young persons, all of whom were students at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. Later, violence erupted during the riots in Athens, with police claiming that protesters had burned trash cans and thrown Molotov cocktails. The police responded by dispersing the crowd with tear gas and stun grenades. Seven police officers were allegedly injured, and five people were taken into custody.
