No less than 70 kilos worth of copper cables were pried away from rail infrastructure in the Dialogi site, west of the northern city of Thessaloniki, by what authorities said was a 40-year-old suspect overnight.
The suspect, identified as a Georgian national repatriated as an ethnic Greek from the Caucasus country.
The location of the theft was a Hellenic Railways Organization (OSE) station.
A security guard noticed a prowler at the site and called police, with officers later arresting one suspect in his attempt to flee. Authorities accused the man of another three such rail-related thefts last Sunday.
He was found with burglar tools and gloves in his possession.
The scourge of vandalism targeting rail infrastructure in the country, most but not all the work of “metal hunters”, has generated heightened attention since a late February 2023 two-train collision at the Tempi site in north-central Greece claimed the lives of 57 people – the deadliest rail accident in the country’s history.
An aerial view of the deadly Tempi rail collision.
At the time, OSE rail traffic directors at the Larissa station switched a north-bound passenger train onto the south-bound line in order to bypass a stretch of railroad that was rendered inoperable due to vandalism from the theft of metal cables. However, due to human error – and failure of adequate electronic and manual backup systems – the passenger train’s conductors weren’t subsequently ordered back to the north-bound line after bypassing the specific stretch.
Both ill-fated trains were operated by private Hellenic Train.
