The Larissa stationmaster faces a number of costs of disrupting transport and placing lives in danger.
A Greek railway worker has been jailed pending trial over a prepare crash that killed a minimum of 57 folks.
The 59-year-old man’s detention on Sunday got here as clashes erupted between police and protestors within the Greek capital, Athens.
Hundreds of individuals had rallied within the metropolis to display for higher security regulation following the head-on collision between a passenger prepare and a freight service on the Athens-Thessaloniki route late within the night of February 28.
The railway worker, who can’t be named below Greek legislation, was the stationmaster within the central metropolis of Larissa, the place the prepare crash passed off.
He faces a number of costs of disrupting transport and placing lives in danger.
The transport security cost probably carries a life sentence, in line with the eKathimerini newspaper.
“For about 20 cursed minutes he was answerable for the protection of the entire of central Greece,” his lawyer Stefanos Pantzartzidis stated.
Pantzartzidis has beforehand stated that his consumer was devastated and had assumed duty “proportionate to him”, however different elements have been additionally at play, with out elaborating.
Railway employees say the nation’s rail community has been creaking below cost-cutting and underinvestment, a legacy of Greece’s debilitating debt disaster from 2010 to 2018.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who blamed the crash on human error, acknowledged that many years of neglect might have contributed to the catastrophe. “As prime minister, I owe everybody, however most of all of the family members of the victims, an apology,” he wrote on his Fb account. “Justice will very quick examine the tragedy and decide liabilities.”
Railway employees’ unions say security techniques all through the rail community have been poor for years as a distant surveillance and signaling system had not been delivered on time. They’ve known as upon the federal government to supply a timetable for the implementation of security protocols.
Mitsotakis stated that if there had been a distant system in place, “it could have been, in observe, unimaginable for the accident to occur”.
In Athens, some 10,000 folks gathered by the big esplanade in entrance of parliament on Sunday to specific sympathy for the lives misplaced and to demand higher security requirements on the rail community.
“That crime will not be forgotten,” protesters shouted as they launched black balloons into the sky.
A placard learn: “Their insurance policies value human lives.”
Lots of the crash victims have been college students getting back from a weekend break.
At the least 9 younger folks learning at Thessaloniki’s Aristotle College have been amongst these killed on the passenger prepare.
The protests in Athens later descended into violence, with police accusing demonstrators of setting fireplace to garbage bins and throwing Molotov cocktails. Police responded by firing tear fuel and stun grenades to clear the sq..
Seven officers have been reportedly damage, whereas 5 arrests have been made.
