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Greek train crash toll rises as rescuers comb through charred wreckage

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Rescuers combed through charred and buckled rail carriages for more victims of Greece’s deadliest train crash on Thursday, a disaster that killed at least 46 people and has led to a national outpouring of grief and anger.

The high-speed passenger train with more than 350 people on board smashed head-on into a freight train near the city of Larissa late on Tuesday. Carriages were thrown off the tracks, with two entirely crushed and several engulfed in flames.

“The most difficult moment is this one, where instead of saving lives we have to recover bodies,” 40-year old rescuer Konstantinos Imanimidis told Reuters on the site of the crash, 130 miles (210 km) north of Athens.

“Temperatures of 1,200 degrees and more in the carriages cannot allow for anyone to remain alive.”

Nearby, two brothers were crying, saying they had come to the site of the crash in the hope of getting some news of their father, aged around 60, after the hospital could not tell them whether his body had been recovered.

Many of the passengers had to kick through windows to escape the flames. To identify some of the victims, relatives had to give DNA samples at a hospital in Larissa, where disbelief turned to anger for some.

“Some bastard has to pay for this,” one relative shouted

Many of the victims were university students returning home after a long holiday weekend and officials said the death toll was expected to rise further. Scores were injured.

The wreck triggered sadness and anger across Greece, where the government has declared three days of national mourning.

Protesters hurled rocks at train company offices in Athens in the evening, before being dispersed by volleys of tear gas fired by riot police. Protests also broke out in Thessaloniki.

And on Thursday, trains were brought to a halt in a day of strike against what unions said was successive governments’ refusal to hear repeated demands to improve safety standards.

Newly appointed Transport Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis said he had been tasked with investigating the reasons behind the accident and with modernising the infrastructure, after his predecessor, Kostas Karamanlis, resigned on Wednesday over the crash.

INVESTIGATION

The station master of Larissa train station was arrested on Wednesday as authorities probed the circumstances that led to the passenger train, en route to the northern city of Thessaloniki, colliding with another train carrying shipping containers coming in the opposite direction on the same track.

He was expected to appear before a local magistrate on Thursday.

In a televised address on Wednesday night, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who had earlier visited the site of the crash, said that evidence pointed to a human error.

Nikos Tsouridis, a retired train driver trainer, said human error did not fully explain what happened.

“The station master made a mistake, he acknowledged it, but surely there should be a safety mechanism to fall back on,” he said.

Greece sold railway operator TRAINOSE under its international bailout programme in 2017 to Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, expecting hundreds of millions of euros to be invested in rail infrastructure in the coming years.

The Italian operation has responsibility for passenger and freight, and the Greek state-controlled OSE for infrastructure.

(Reuters)

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