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Days after the nation’s deadliest rail accident, protests in Greece have grown more violent as thousands of students have taken to the streets in numerous cities and some demonstrators have fought with police in Athens.
Just before midnight on Tuesday, a passenger train collided with a freight truck, killing at least 57 people, many of them college students. A railway official is accused of manslaughter, and the government has placed the blame on human error.
The violence on Friday night was not severe, and the protests were otherwise peaceful. Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, also saw clashes.
A few protesters in Athens threw petrol bombs at riot police, set trash cans on fire, and challenged police cordons, prompting them to use tear gas and flash grenades to disperse them. There were no reported injuries or arrests.
Anger over the alleged absence of safety measures in Greece’s rail network served as the catalyst for the protests organized by left-wing and student groups. The largest occurred on Friday in Larissa, a city in central Greece, not far from the crash site, where thousands of people peacefully marched. The protests on Wednesday and Thursday were comparable.
Northern Greece’s first funeral
The Tempe accident, which occurred 380 kilometers (235 miles) north of Athens, shocked the country and brought attention to the small but antiquated rail network’s safety flaws.
The funeral service for the first victim was held in northern Greece on Friday as recovery teams spent a third day searching the wreckage and families started receiving the remains of their loved ones.
In her hometown of Katerini, Athina Katsara, a 34-year-old mother of a young boy, was being laid to rest. Her hospitalized husband was unable to attend because of his injuries.
gruesome identification procedure
Calculating the death toll was challenging due to the force of the head-on collision and the ensuing fire. To determine the number, officials worked around the clock to match tissue samples with pieces of burned and dismembered bodies.
Following identification using next-of-kin DNA samples, the bodies were returned to families in closed caskets for all the remains.
Families of passengers who are still missing awaited test results outside a hospital in Larissa. One of them was Mirella Ruci, whose son Denis, 22, was still missing.
“My son is not currently listed on any official list, and I am not aware of this. Ruci, who struggled to keep her voice from breaking, pleaded with anyone who may have seen him in rail car 5, seat 22, to get in touch with her if they may have.
half-staff flags
On the third day of national mourning, flags at the ancient Acropolis, the parliament, and other public buildings around Greece remained at half-staff. With additional strikes scheduled for the weekend, national rail services were suspended for a second day.
In the course of an ongoing investigation, police searched a rail coordination office in Larissa early on Friday. The station manager of the facility, who is 59 years old, was taken into custody and charged with numerous counts of negligent manslaughter.
According to Stelios Sourlas, an attorney for a 23-year-old collision victim, the station manager was not solely to blame for the fatalities.
“The station manager may be primarily accountable, but there are other parties who share responsibility for ensuring that safety precautions and protocols are followed, such as rail operators and public officials, Sourlas said.
The network, according to rail unions, was not well maintained despite recent upgrades that allowed for faster trains.
Election plans are postponed
National elections in Greece were expected to be called by the country’s center-right government on Friday, but the announcement and anticipated date were likely to be postponed.
The passenger train that crashed was traveling between Athens and Thessaloniki along Greece’s busiest route. On the same track, the freight train was traveling in the opposite direction.
Anastasia Adamidou and Kyprianos Papaioannou, two Cypriot students, were named as two of the victims on Friday. The state would pay for their return to their home countries and funeral expenses, according to Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides.
Neighboring The flags flying over government buildings in Albania will be flown at half-staff on Sunday in remembrance of the victims in Greece, according to Prime Minister Edi Rama.
