- At least 43 people died in a train crash.
- Rescue personnel is still looking for survivors.
- It’s unclear why the two services were sharing the same track.
One of Greece‘s deadliest rail disasters, which cost at least 43 lives, was caused by a “tragic human mistake,” according to the country’s prime minister.
Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis commented after visiting the scene of a head-on accident between a passenger train and a freight train on Tuesday night.
Manslaughter charges have been filed against the local stationmaster. The Greek transport minister has stepped down.
Rescue personnel is still looking for survivors.
The collision occurred shortly before midnight on Tuesday. A passenger train carrying 350 passengers collided with a freight train as it emerged from a tunnel after leaving Larissa.
It’s unclear why the two services were sharing the same track.
The stationmaster in charge of signaling denies any malfeasance and attributes the accident to a suspected technical breakdown.
After seeing the location, Mr. Mitsotakis said everything pointed to “a tragic human error”.
“Justice will do its work,” he remarked on television. “People will be held accountable, and the state will be on their side.”
Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis announced his resignation, saying, “When something so awful happens, it is hard to continue and pretend it did not happen.”
According to trade unions, crashes are caused by a variety of circumstances, and the crash revealed persistent flaws such as a shortage of employees, faulty signals, and outmoded infrastructure.
The passenger train’s first four cars were derailed, and the first two caught fire and were “almost completely destroyed,” according to Thessaly regional governor Kostas Agorastos.
The train was traveling from Athens to Thessaloniki, which has a sizable student population, and it is believed that many of those on board were students returning from a Greek Orthodox lent vacation.
One scared passenger told that “people were panicked and yelling” following the incident.
Giannis Antonoglou, who escaped from the fifth compartment of the passenger train, stated the windows abruptly burst, and “we ended up being inclined 45 degrees as if going to tip”.
According to Stergios Minenis, a 28-year-old passenger who jumped to safety from the wreckage,
Stergios Minenis, a 28-year-old passenger who jumped to safety from the wreckage, told that: “The fire was immediate. As we were turning over we were being burned.”
Other passengers claimed that in order to escape the blazing wreckage, they were forced to break carriage windows with their bodies or bags.
According to Larissa’s mayor, some of those who died will only be identified through genetic testing.
Families of missing passengers have donated DNA samples to aid in the identification of bodies, according to a hospital in Larissa.
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