Alghadeer TV Alghadeer TV
Massive protests erupt across nation, demanding action on broken rail system
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis apologized Sunday for the train crash last week that killed at least 57 people, vowing to fix the nation’s broken rail system while the stationmaster charged in the crash made his first court appearance.
Massive protests continued across the country to demand action after Mitsotakis said human negligence had likely caused the crash, which led him to announce a plan to overhaul the railway system in recent days.
“As prime minister, I owe everyone, but above all the relatives of the victims, a big SORRY,” Mitsotakis wrote on Facebook. “In the Greece of 2023, it is not possible for two trains to run on opposite sides of the same track without anyone noticing.”
Mitsotakis, who is seeking re-election this spring, said he plans to appoint an independent committee to investigate the deadliest train disaster in the country’s history.
“We can’t, won’t and shouldn’t hide behind human error,” Mitsotakis said, vowing to seek help from Brussels, the EU and other international sources for funding and engineering.
“I will immediately ask the European Commission and friendly countries for their contribution to know-how so that we can finally obtain modern trains,” said Mitsotakis. “And I will fight for additional community funding to quickly maintain and upgrade the existing network.”
Elsewhere, the stationmaster testified before a panel of magistrates in Larissa — where the doomed train made its last stop — for more than seven hours Sunday as the first wave of funerals were held for some crash victims.
The still-unnamed 59-year-old rail employee, who had been on the job for only four days before the crash, was ordered jailed until his upcoming trial on charges of negligent homicide.
Outside the courtroom, attorney Stefanos Pantzartzidis indicated his client was “devastated” and said the defendant “assumes the blame proportionate to him.”
Meanwhile Sunday, thousands of protesters continued massive demonstrations in the capital of Athens, and in the country’s second-largest city of Thessaloniki, as well as Larissa, where outnumbered police forces fired tear gas on demonstrators who chanted “This crime will not be covered up!” and “We will be the voice of the dead!”
Rail workers have also gone on strike since the crash, halting train services nationwide.
More protests are planned in the coming days to keep pressure on Mitsotakis to fix the crumbling rail network which spans more than 1,500 miles and has been in dire need of upgrades for years, mostly due to the lack of government oversight.
The disaster happened Feb. 28 in Tempe in northern Greece where two locomotives — one a freight train and the other loaded with 350 passengers — collided after barreling toward each other on the same track for several minutes.
The European Public Prosecutor’s Office has launched an investigation into a maintenance contract that was charged with the upkeep of the rail’s signaling system as well as other remote functions that should have prevented the crash.
Greece’s transport minister Kostas Karamanlis resigned hours after the crash, while slamming the government’s rail system as “not up to 21st century standards.”
“It is a fact that we received the Greek railway system in a state that is not up to 21st century standards,” he said, adding that in the last three and a half years the government had “made every effort to improve this reality.”
