College students from various universities around the country gathered at the southern entrance of the Tempi Gorge in central Greece on Saturday to pay tribute to the victims, many fellow students, who perished when two trains collided at the spot in late February 2023.
The students carried flowers and a banner that proclaimed that the rail accident was a “premeditated crime”, while demanding a full investigation into the deadly collision, which claimed 57 lives, as well as avoidance of any cover-up.
One student association’s statement read: “one year after the crime committed in Tempi, we demand it not be covered up. We will continue to defend our lives against their profits to make sure those politically at fault accountable. The struggle we are waging concerns the entire population!”
The primary cause of the crash, according to initial probes, was a catastrophic error by an apparently poorly trained station master to switch a north-bound passenger train into the path of an ongoing south-bound freight train before midnight on Feb. 28, 2023. Other factors were the premature departure from their evening shift of other, more experienced train directors at the main Larissa station, and, of course, a complete absence or non-functioning electronic and manual backup safety systems and protocols that would have prevented the unprecedented rail tragedy.
Several arrests were made in the wake of the deadly crash, with the suspects, including the station master who made the mistake, on remand pending trial on several felony counts.
The poor state of Greece’s paltry, by European standards, rail network is a long-standing predicament in the country, with successive governments over the past decades responsible.
