ATHENS: Tens of thousands of people across Greece demonstrated Saturday in solidarity with victims of the country’s worst train tragedy, which claimed 57 lives in 2023 and rattled the government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
More than a hundred gatherings were held in Greece and abroad to demand justice for the victims, most of whom were young students returning from a three-day carnival weekend.
“We are here because, three years after the Tempe disaster, we still don’t know exactly what happened, justice has not yet been served and those responsible are still walking free,” Lydia Pagkali, a 28-year-old woman protesting in Athens, told AFP.
“Even today we don’t feel safe taking the train or the metro,” she added.
At the close of the mostly peaceful protest, riot police fired tear gas and stun grenades at small groups of youths throwing stones and bottles at them. Nearly a dozen people were arrested.
The crash on February 28, 2023 took place when a passenger locomotive carrying some 350 people from Athens to Thessaloniki hit a freight train in the dead of night, in the Vale of Tempe in central Greece.
The two trains had run on the same track for more than 10 minutes without triggering any alarm, laying bare the parlous state of the Greek railway network’s security fail-safes — despite European Union grants for their modernisation.
“We are protesting against a government, a state that has proven it does not take us into account,” 21-year-old student Yiannis Angelidis said in Thessaloniki.
– ‘Murderers’ –
The head of an association of relatives of the victims, Pavlos Aslanidis, said the families demanded “justice for the dead”.
“We will allow nothing to be forgotten,” Aslanidis told a large crowd in Athens’s Syntagma Square, accusing the government and justice officials of attempting to “bury” the truth and “insulting” the victims’ families by repeatedly turning down requests to exhume the dead for tests.