The head of the Larisa railway station in northern Greece has been formally detained pending determination of his possible responsibility in the head-on collision of two trains that has left at least 36 people dead.
Following the incident, the authorities had proceeded to question some of the officials involved in the train traffic, in an attempt to clarify the reasons for the head-on collision of the two trains, which ran for some time on the same track, reports ERT channel.
The station manager has argued that the system that regulates the distribution of trains on the different tracks is automated and that, therefore, it did not work. Among the questions to be clarified is whether there was a concatenation of failures and to what extent there was human error or negligence.
One of the two convoys has been identified as a freight train, while the other, a passenger train, had about 350 people on board. Authorities have treated some 130 people for injuries, of whom at least 66 have been taken to various hospitals in the area, and have located several charred victims.
The mayor of Tempe, Giorgos Manoli, has assured that temperatures of 1,200 to 1,500 degrees Celsius have been reached in the first three cars, so it is taken for granted that the death toll will continue to rise — the local media put the provisional death toll at 40.
The Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has travelled to the site of the accident and promised that, in addition to caring for the victims and identifying the bodies, the authorities will do everything possible to discover the causes. Also «to prevent something like this from happening again», he told reporters, according to the newspaper ‘Kathimerini’.
The Greek government has declared three days of national mourning, until Friday, because of the incident. Public events have been suspended and the main leaders, including President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, have canceled their official agenda.
