Demonstration outside the Greek parliament in Athens over Tuesday's train crash that left at least 57 dead, mostly students. 3 Mar 2023.
Athens – Thousands of people in Athens, Thessaloniki and other Greek cities demonstrated again today over Tuesday's train crash that left at least 57 dead, mostly students. In the evening in Athens, radical groups clashed with the police, who used tear gas against them. On the second day, the strike of railway employees continued, according to whom the accident was caused by a poor safety system, the shortcomings of which have been pointed out by trade unions for a long time. Unions announced today that they are extending the rail strike for the whole weekend and are demanding a meeting with the Transport Minister. Only after that will they decide whether to continue the strike, wrote the daily Kathimerini. According to him, Tuesday's tragedy is the worst railway accident in the country's history.
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Photo gallery: Train crash in Greece
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Demonstrations have been taking place since Wednesday in Athens, Thessaloniki and Larisa, where the accident happened shortly before midnight on Tuesday. Also, trains in Greece have not been running since Wednesday noon. On the first day, all services were stopped by Hellenic Train, which operates passenger and freight transport in Greece and is owned by the Italian national carrier Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane. From Thursday, the Greek railway unions announced a strike, first for one day, which they then extended, and most recently today by two days straight.
“Their profits, our dead” or “It was not an accident, but a murder” were written on the banners of the participants of today's demonstration in Athens. Many carried black and white balloons, with the words “Call when you arrive” written on the white. According to the Kathimerini newspaper, such a message was found on the phone of one of the victims. The sentence, to which the parents no longer received an answer, became the symbolic slogan of the current protests.
Today, the demonstration was also held in front of the hospital in the city of Larisa, where seven dozen injured people and the bodies of the victims, or their parts, were taken after the train collision. A number of passengers from the train burned to death and their identification is only possible thanks to DNA analysis with the help of samples from the survivors who arrived in Larisa. Just before midnight on Tuesday, a passenger train carrying about 350 people collided head-on with a freight train near this city.
As of this evening, 54 victims have been identified, 38 injured remain in hospital, seven of them in intensive care units . The search and removal of train wreckage continued today.
The cause of the train collision was apparently human error, the 59-year-old station master in Larisa was arrested already on Wednesday, who, according to the media, confessed to having made a mistake that caused the trains to run on the same track. However, many employees of the railways claim that the responsibility should also be borne by those who made the early warning system not work on the main line from Athens to the second largest city of Thessaloniki.
“The federation has been sounding the alarm for many years, but no one took it seriously,” said the main union of railway workers. Its representatives demand a meeting with the new Minister of Transport Jorgos Gerapetritis. He was appointed to the post on Thursday after the previous transport minister, Kostas Karamanlis, resigned, saying he was taking some responsibility for the accident. According to the AP, Karamanlis said, among other things, that he was trying “with all his might” to improve the railway system, which he said was not in a state that would “correspond to the 21st century”. The trade unions want the new transport minister to present them with a clear time frame for the introduction of new security measures.
The opposition left-wing party SYRIZA, led by Alexis Tsipras, who was prime minister until July 2019, when he was replaced by the current right-wing Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. “Any attempt to hide the truth about the tragedy in Tempi will be disrespectful to the victims and a harbinger of new tragedies,” Reuters quoted a spokesman for the SYRIZA party, which is the main opposition party in the country, as saying. On Wednesday, the government promised to thoroughly investigate the accident.
Parliamentary elections are to be held in Greece by July. The government previously said they could be held as early as spring, and the media speculated about the April 9 date. The Reuters agency wrote today that after Tuesday's tragedy, the elections could be held later than in April.
