More than 15,000 people protest in Greece after fatal train derailment

This Sunday, more than 15,000 people took part in fresh protests in Athens sparked by a train derailment that killed 57 people on February 28, with demonstrators blaming the government for degrading infrastructure.

Thousands of workers and students marched through the center of the Greek capital demanding justice and denouncing privatization policies in the railway sector, police said.

“Privatization costs lives” and “You are murderers,” read the posters of the demonstrators in front of the Greek Parliament building.

In Athens, traffic was blocked on several central streets, and metro stations were also closed.

“We are not going to leave them alone. We will not let this crime be forgotten,” said Dimitris Koutsoumbas, general secretary of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), who took part in the protest.

In Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city, thousands of students and workers also took to the streets to protest government policies.

Greece has been experiencing massive protests for almost two weeks now following an accident on the night of February 28, when a passenger train collided head-on with a freight train north of the city of Larisa, killing 57 people, most of them a university. students.

Mobilization will continue next week as part of a 24-hour general strike called on Thursday by public and private sector unions whose main demand is to find the “true culprits” of Larisa’s “crime”.

Last Wednesday, more than 40,000 people, according to police, and up to 60,000, according to some media reports, demonstrated in Athens as part of a public sector general strike, one of the largest mobilizations in recent years in the country.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis took political responsibility for the accident and acknowledged that there were no security measures at the site where the disaster occurred that could have prevented it.

Charges have so far been filed against four employees of the state-run OSE railway company, including a stationmaster who admitted to prosecutors that he put a passenger train on the same track as a freight train traveling in the opposite direction.

The accident and the resulting wave of public outrage comes less than two months before a general election, for which a date has yet to be set, though according to the Greek press, May 21 is the most likely date.