A Greek court opened a criminal case this Thursday against three employees of the railway network for alleged responsibility for the accident that killed 57 people, charging them with “violation of transport safety”, manslaughter and assault on physical integrity.
One of the three employees is a train inspector, and the other two are accused of leaving work earlier than they were supposed to on the night of February 28, when a passenger train collided head-on with a freight train at Tempe, about 300 km away. from Athens, near the city of Larissa.
On Sunday, the head of the station, Larisa, was accused of the same charge and placed in a pre-trial detention center.
The rail accident, attributed largely to “human error” and already considered the worst that Greece has seen in recent years, shocked the country and revealed the degradation of the rail network and, above all, the failure of safety systems.
Numerous violent protests have taken place in Greece in recent days, with protesters accusing the government of not modernizing the rail network despite warnings from experts and unions about insecurity.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis acknowledged on Sunday that the rail network lacks security measures and automated control systems and asked all Greeks for “great forgiveness”.
The crash and the resulting wave of public outrage comes just a few weeks before the scheduled date for the next legislative election, April 9, although authorities have already mentioned they are looking into postponing the vote to May.