Thousands of Greek college students mounted sit-ins and took part in protests in Athens Friday, to name for justice for individuals who misplaced their lives within the nation’s deadliest prepare accident.
A passenger prepare and a freight prepare crashed in Larissa, Greece on Tuesday, leading to at the very least 57 fatalities. The passenger prepare carried roughly 350 passengers, lots of whom are nonetheless lacking.
Around 5,000 protesters gathered within the capital exterior the places of work of community operators Hellenic Train, who took over your complete community in 2017, to voice their outrage on the decadeslong incapacity to extend rail community security regardless of near-fatal incidents up to now.
After demonstrators red-dappled the phrase “murderers” on the constructing’s glass facade, the viewers yelled out in outrage. “We are furious beyond measure. It’s unacceptable that such a horrific incident occurs in 2023,” stated Angelos Thomopoulos, a protester.
To demand that these concerned on this atrocity be held accountable and that nothing be hushed up, we’re marching to the streets at the moment, he instructed Agence France-Presse (AFP). The majority of the demonstrators had been school college students, lots of whom had been of comparable age because the victims of Tuesday’s collision, the worst rail accident in Greece’s historical past.
Maria Psacheli, one other demonstrator, claimed that her personal baby steadily traveled the identical journey to attend college, she instructed AFP on the Athens rally.
“I’m thinking of the victims’ families,” she stated with tears in her eyes. Later protests are scheduled in Athens and Greece’s second-largest metropolis, Thessaloniki.
Most of the victims had been college students of their 20s getting back from a protracted weekend. Students had been staging sit-ins in over two dozen college colleges and faculties across the nation.
Black sheets had been draped on the entrances of a number of universities and white roses had been thrown onto the tracks of the native prepare station in Larissa. The Larissa station grasp on obligation on the time of the catastrophe has been arrested and charged with negligent murder.
He has accepted partial accountability for failing to reroute the trains and faces a potential life sentence if convicted. But prepare unionists notice that security issues on the Athens-Thessaloniki railway line had been recognized for years.
Five years after the state-owned Greek rail operator Trainose was privatized, offered to Italy’s Ferrovie Dello Stato Italiane, and rebranded as Hellenic Train, the protection mechanisms on the road are nonetheless not completely automated. “I was always hesitant to use the train because I knew that line wasn’t safe,” Aphrodite a 20-year-old pupil stated. The firm obtained a bomb risk on Friday, but it surely turned out to be a faux.
Source: www.dailysabah.com
