Greece train crash: 57 confirmed dead as public anger grows

The death toll in Tuesday’s train crash in Greece has risen to 57 people, a coroner told the BBC.

Eleni Zaggelidou, one of ten coroners working on the investigation, said DNA was taken from 57 intact bodies.

A government minister said austerity during Greece’s economic crisis of the 2000s contributed to a lack of investment in the rail sector.

Railway workers staged a one-day strike on Thursday following the disaster, accusing the government of negligence.

More than 2,000 people demonstrated for a second day in Athens and Thessaloniki, shocked by the disaster near the town of Larissa.

“We are angry at the company, at the government and previous governments who did nothing to improve the conditions of the Greek railway,” said Stavros Nantis, a retiree in Athens.

Rescuers continue to scour the burned and damaged carriages, looking for victims.

This is the “most difficult moment”, rescuer Konstantinos Imanimidis told the Reuters news agency, because “instead of saving lives, we have to recover bodies”.

A passenger service carrying 350 people collided shortly before midnight on Tuesday with a freight train after they ended up on the same track, causing the front carriages to catch fire.

The railway workers’ strike began at 06:00 local time (04:00 GMT), affecting national rail services and the Athens metro.

Many in Greece view the accident as an accident waiting to happen, and the union blamed successive governments’ “lack of respect” for Greek railways for leading to this “tragic outcome.”

During a visit to a hospital where relatives of the missing had gathered, Zoe Rapti, Greece’s deputy health minister, told the BBC that investment in the rail network had been made more difficult by the crisis of Greek debt around 2010, which led to drastic austerity. measures in exchange for a financial bailout from the EU and the International Monetary Fund.

“Of course, things should have been done during these years, but, as you remember, Greece faced a big economic crisis for more than 10 years, which meant that a lot of things went backwards” , she said.

She said a “vast investigation” would take place and it would provide answers, she promised.

Government spokesman Giannis Oikonomous also said that “chronic delays” in implementing rail projects were due to “distortions” in the country’s public sector for decades.

A 59-year-old Larissa station manager has been charged with negligent manslaughter and is due to appear in court on Thursday. He acknowledged his share of responsibility in the accident, declared his lawyer Stefanos Pantzartzidis outside the courthouse.

“He is literally devastated. From the first moment, he has taken responsibility proportionate to him,” Mr. Pantzartzidis said, suggesting that the station chief, who has not been named publicly, was not the only one responsible.

Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis resigned following the accident, saying he would take responsibility for the authorities’ “long-standing failures” to fix a rail system that was not fit for the 21st century.

But Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ suggestion that a “tragic human error” was to blame sparked anger.

On Wednesday evening, rioters clashed with police outside the Athens headquarters of Hellenic Train, the company responsible for maintaining Greece’s railways.

Tear gas was used to disperse protesters, who threw stones and lit fires in the streets.

At a silent vigil in Larissa to commemorate the victims of the incident, one protester said he believed the disaster was long overdue.

“The rail network seemed problematic, with worn-out and poorly paid staff,” Nikos Savva, a Cypriot medical student, told AFP.

The arrested station chief should not pay the price “for an entire system in difficulty”, he argued.

Most of the passengers on board were students in their 20s returning to Thessaloniki after a long weekend celebrating the Greek Orthodox Lent.

Firefighter spokesman Vassilis Varthakogiannis said the temperature inside the first carriage – which caught fire – reached 1,300C, making it “difficult to identify the people inside.” ‘interior’.

Local media reported that more than 10 people are still missing, as Greece observes three days of national mourning.

Families have given DNA samples to aid identification efforts, with results expected Thursday.

One of them, a woman called Katerina, searching for her missing brother, a train passenger, shouted “Murderers!” ” in front of the Larissa hospital, directing his anger at the government and the railway company, reports Reuters.

Kostas Malizos, a recently retired surgeon and professor emeritus at the Greek University of Thessaly, returned to work to operate on injured passengers.

“It’s a disaster, it’s catastrophic,” he said. “Families are crying tonight. Unfortunately, the majority of those lost are young students. They left home, happy after the long weekend, to go study or see their loved ones and never made it back to them. “