At least 57 people killed when a passenger train in Greece collided head-on with a freight train late on Tuesday. Derailing carriages that then burst into flames in the country’s deadliest rail crash in living memory. This is by far the most horrible incident in Greece.
A passenger service carrying 350 people collided with a freight train just before midnight on Tuesday after they ended up on the same track. Causing the front carriages to burst into flames. The railway workers’ strike began at 06:00 local time (04:00 GMT). Hitting national rail services and the subway in Athens. Many in Greece see the crash as an accident that had been waiting to happen. The union blamed successive governments’ “disrespect” towards Greek railways for leading to this “tragic result”.
Greek Fire Service spokesperson Vassilis Varthakogiannis said that at least 57 people killed and that of the 72 injured people, 57 in hospitals. Six of them are in intensive care. He added that search and rescue operations will continue through the night. At least 72 firefighters with 24 vehicles are on the scene.
DNA samples are being used to identify the dead, Greek police spokesperson Constantia Dimoglidou said at the briefing.
More than 2,000 people protested for a second day in Athens and Thessaloniki. Shocked by the disaster near the city of Larissa. “We are angry at the company, at the government, and past governments that did nothing to improve conditions in the Greek railway,” said pensioner Stavros Nantis in Athens. Many of the passengers on board were students in their 20s returning to Thessaloniki after a long weekend celebrating Greek Orthodox Lent.
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The Greek prime minister said that during his visit to the Larissa hospital. Where many of the injured are being treated, he met relatives of the dead and the missing. “They asked me ‘why.’ And they told me ‘never again.‘ We owe them an honest answer,” he said.