1000’s participate in a brand new Greek protest towards a deadly prepare accident
1000’s of individuals rallied on Sunday to protest security shortcomings in Greece’s railway community, practically two weeks after dozens have been killed within the nation’s worst prepare accident.
The demonstrators additionally demanded that these liable for the head-on collision between a passenger prepare and a freight prepare, which killed 57 individuals on February 28, be punished. Police mentioned greater than 8,000 individuals in Athens gathered outdoors parliament to protest on Sunday.
Protesters later marched into the workplaces of the privatized prepare operator Hellenic Prepare. The corporate, owned by Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane since 2017, is just not liable for the upkeep of the railway community. The state-owned Greek Railways is liable for upkeep.
Authorities closed 4 metro stations on two strains working via central Athens due to the protest.
The march was organized by civil servants, a pro-communist commerce union, and college college students.
In Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest metropolis, about 5,000 individuals demonstrated, listening to speeches and chanting slogans equivalent to “We would be the voice of all of the useless.”
Sunday’s rallies, which handed with out critical incident, weren’t as properly attended as comparable occasions earlier within the week, when greater than 30,000 took half in Athens and greater than 20,000 in Thessaloniki. Police mentioned 4 individuals have been arrested in Athens.
A memorial service was held for 12 college students of the Aristotle College of Thessaloniki, the biggest Greek college, who died in a prepare accident.
An inexperienced station supervisor was accused of placing the trains on the identical observe and charged with negligent murder and different offences, and the nation’s transport minister and senior railway officers resigned the day after the accident.
The revelation of significant safety holes on Greece’s busiest railway line has put the centre-right authorities of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on the defensive. He pledged the federal government’s full cooperation with a judicial investigation into the incident.
Elections are due later this spring, and opinion polls printed final week confirmed the ruling Conservatives’ lead over the left-wing opposition shrinking by practically half in comparison with opinion polls printed earlier than the crash.
(AP)
