The passenger train and a freight train collided late Tuesday, sending carriages into twisted steel knots and forcing people to smash windows to escape. It was the country’s deadliest crash ever and more than 50 people remained hospitalized, most in the central Greek city of Larissa, six of them in intensive care.
Fire department spokesman Yiannis Artopios said the grim recovery effort was proceeding “inch by inch”.
“We can see that there are more (bodies) of people. Unfortunately, due to the collision, they are in a very bad condition,” Artopios told state television.
STATION MANAGER CHARGED, EMPLOYEES SAY TRAIN SYSTEM UNSAFE
The cause of the crash is still not clear. A stationmaster arrested after the collision was charged on Wednesday with multiple manslaughter and causing serious bodily harm by negligence as an inquest seeks to determine why the two trains were traveling in opposite directions on the same track.
Railway workers’ associations, meanwhile, called strikes, halting national railway services and the Athens metro. They are protesting working conditions and what they described as a dangerous failure to modernize Greece’s railway system due to a lack of public investment during the deep financial crisis that spanned most of the previous decade and brought Greece to the brink of bankruptcy.
Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis resigned after the crash, tasking his replacement with launching an independent investigation into the causes of the accident.
“Responsibility will be assigned,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a televised address late Wednesday after visiting the scene of the collision.
“We will make sure that the words ‘never again’… are not an empty promise. I promise.”
Supporters of the strike plan to protest in central Athens later Thursday.
CRASH SURVIVOR DESCRIBES FIERY ESCAPE
More than 300 people were aboard the passenger train, many of them students returning from a holiday weekend and annual Carnival celebrations in Greece.
Andreas Alikaniotis, a 20-year-old survivor of the crash, described how he and fellow students escaped from a railcar with scissors as the fire approached, smashing windows and throwing luggage on the ground outside to use as a makeshift landing pad.
“It was a steep fall, into a ditch,” Alikaniotis, who suffered a knee injury, told reporters from his hospital bed in Larissa.
“The lights went out. And light had come from the approaching fire and the flying sparks. The smoke was suffocating inside the train car and also outside,” said Alikaniotis.
“I managed to stay calm and I was one of the few people around who wasn’t seriously injured,” he said. “Me and my friends helped people get out.”
GREANS OFFER HELP, ZELENSKYY, TURKEY SENDS CONDOLEANCE
Residents of Larissa lined up to donate blood, many waiting for more than an hour in the torrential rain, while the town’s hotel association provided free accommodation to relatives of the accident victims and to those traveling to the town to collect DNA provide samples for forensic investigation of police experts identify agencies. Nine bodies have been identified through genetic matches so far, according to authorities.
Pope Francis and European leaders sent messages of condolence after the crash. Among them was Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, whose country is recovering from devastating earthquakes last month. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sent a message in Greek, writing: “The people of Ukraine share the pain of the families of the victims. We wish all injured a speedy recovery.”
Gatopoulos reported from Athens, Greece.
