Deadly train crash prompts strike; relatives give DNA

THESSALONIKI (AP):

Family members lined up to give DNA samples in hopes of identifying victims of a train crash that killed nearly 60 people in Greece, as workers went on strike Thursday saying the rail system is outdated, underfunded and dangerous.

The government has blamed human error, and a railway official was charged with manslaughter.

Emergency crews, meanwhile, inched through the mangled remains of passenger carriages in their search for the dead from Tuesday night’s head-on collision, which has left 57 confirmed dead — a number that rescuers fear will increase.

The collision of a passenger train and a freight train was the country’s deadliest ever, and more than 48 people remained hospitalised — with six in intensive care, most in the central Greek city of Larissa.

Dozens of grieving relatives spent a second day at a Larissa hospital awaiting the results of DNA identification on the bodies, many of which were burned or mangled beyond recognition.

Among them was Dimitris Bournazis, who said the crash should lead to a full safety overhaul of the country’s rail system.

“I’ve lost my brother, my father. That can’t change, I know it,” he said, “But the point is for us not to mourn victims like that again. They bought 50 tickets to death.”

Fire Service spokesman Yiannis Artopios said the grim recovery effort was proceeding “centimetre by centimetre”.

“We can see that there are more (bodies) of people there. Unfortunately they are in a very bad condition because of the collision,” Artopios told state television.

Rescuers were focusing on the restaurant car, which was crushed under the first carriage from the force of the collision, said fire official Vassilios Vathrakogiannis.

“This morning we removed seven burned bodies from that carriage,” he said.

The Larissa station manager arrested after the collision was charged Thursday with multiple counts of manslaughter and causing serious physical harm through negligence, as a judicial inquiry tries to establish how the two trains could be travelling in opposite directions on the same track for more than 10 minutes without anyone raising the alarm.

Railway workers’ associations called strikes, halting national rail services and the subway in Athens. They are protesting working conditions and what they described as a dangerous failure to modernise the rail system due to a lack of public investment during the deep financial crisis that spanned most of the previous decade and brought Greece to the brink of bankruptcy.

Despite years of modernisation projects, much of the key rail control work is still manually operated.