Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/ATHENS: Protests have erupted in Greece over the rail crash which killed 43 people, with several seeing it as the accident that had been waiting to happen.
According to the BBC, rioters clashed with Greek police outside Athens headquarters of Hellenic Train, the company responsible for maintaining Greece’s railways.
Protests were also held in Thessaloniki and Larissa, where the incident happened on Tuesday night. The government has announced that an independent investigation would deliver justice.
Three days of national mourning had been declared across the country following the accident, as a passenger train crashed head-on into a freight train, causing the first carriages to burst into flames. The first carriages of the train passenger were mainly destroyed.
Several of the 350 train passengers were students in their 20s returning to Thessaloniki after the long weekend celebrating Greek Orthodox Lent.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Prime Minister of Greece, said “tragic human error” was to blame for the disaster. The station master in Larissa has been charged with manslaughter by negligence. He has denied any wrongdoing, blaming the crash on a technical fault.
Greek Rail union members believe safety systems weren’t working correctly, with repeated warnings about this over several years.
In protest and mourning, rail employees plan to strike on Thursday at what they say is official neglect of the railways.
The workers’ union said, “Pain turned into anger for the dozens of dead and injured colleagues and fellow people.”
“The disrespect shown over the years by Greek governments to the railways led to the tragic result,” it said in comments cited by Reuters news agency.
Kostas Karamanlis, Minister of Transport, resigned over the disaster, saying that he would take responsibility for the authorities’ “long-standing failures” to fix the railway system of Greek he said was not fit for the 21st Century.
Train crash
But outside the hospital where bodies of the train crash’s victims were being brought, the banner was hung claiming any systemic failings would be covered up in the official investigation now underway.
At the silent vigil in Larissa on Wednesday to commemorate the victims of the accident, one demonstrator said that he felt the disaster had only been a matter of time.
“The Greek rail network looked problematic, with worn down, badly paid staff,” a medical student from Cyprus, Nikos Savva, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency.
He said that the station master arrested shouldn’t pay the price “for the whole ailing system. That is an inadmissible accident. We have known this situation for 30 years,” Costas Bargiotas, a doctor based in Larissa, told AFP.
A vigil was held in Athens, outside the offices of Hellenic Train. Later in the day, the matter turned violent in the same place, with Greek police using gas tears to disperse protesters who threw stones and lit fires in the streets.
