In the days after Greece’s deadliest train crash, firefighters and an assortment of untrained volunteers had to comb through heaps of twisted metal and singed debris for human remains.
The special Greek police force created especially for the job of identifying casualties did not visit the site.
For almost a month, no samples of materials from the site were collected for forensic investigation and no systemic record of the debris was made.
In the first three days days after the crash, bulldozers, excavators, flatbed trucks, gravel trucks drove on top of and lifted all of the debris on the site. The area was swept clean.
The National Organization for the Investigation of Air and Railway Accidents and Transport Safety’s report on the crash, presented on Thursday morning, highlights significant gaps in the investigation of the crash site.
Experts from the investigative body stated that it is extremely difficult to provide definitive answers due to the lacking evidence and they cannot determine a clear cause of the fireball that broke out after the collision and led to the loss of several more lives.
The report notes a severe lack of organization at the accident scene. “We did what we usually do and what our radio dispatcher told us, there was no active command post or coordination during the first hours after the accident,” one first responder told them.
According to their report, site perimeters were poorly enforced, leading to unauthorized access and further loss of evidence. Emergency services operated ad hoc, without a clear chain of command or inter-agency protocols, and essential forensic documentation and mapping were not conducted. The collection of samples from the site for investigation only began 29 days after the accident.
The report also notes that bodies were recovered without proper documentation. The report states that initially remains of 56 of the 57 casualties had been identified. An accident investigator commissioned by some families of victims to investigate the case, “accidentally found another small part of human remains among the burned debris of the Restaurant Car” three months later.
The report criticizes the lack of disaster preparedness, noting that no training exercises for railway accidents had ever been conducted.
During the press conference, this issue of “landfilling”—the clearing of wreckage and debris—was raised, with reporters asking why the site had been handled so improperly.
The investigative experts intimated that the improper handling of evidence was due to a lack of knowledge, experience, and preparation among emergency services.
This response sparked tension in the press room, with one attending lawyer shouting, “It matters whether it was done by mistake or deliberately!”
“We are not saying whether it was deliberate or by mistake,” stated the investigators, pushing back. “The commission just says everything was done wrong.”
