Thirty-six people face charges and over 350 witnesses are due to be heard at the trial that opened in the central city of Larissa, near where a freight train and a passenger train collided on February 28, 2023.
Among those to testify are survivors and family members of the victims, some of whom are believed to have burned to death after surviving the initial collision. Most of the dead were students returning from a carnival weekend.
“This trial is starting with great delay…what we want is exemplary punishment of those responsible,” Pavlos Aslanidis, whose 26-year-old son died in the accident and who heads the Association of Victims’ Families, told reporters before the start of the trial.
Maria Karystianou, a pediatrician who led the association for years, and is now planning to launch a political party, said no investigation was carried out into how her daughter “burned alive” and called the trial “stunted.”
“We want the truth to come out,” she said outside the courthouse on Monday.
The accused include the station master on duty on the night of the accident, other railway officials and two Italian former employees of the trains’ parent company, Ferrovie dello Stato.
The two trains had run on the same track for more than 10 minutes without triggering an alarm.
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The disaster exposed the parlous state of the Greek railway network’s safety precautions — despite European Union grants for their modernisation, and repeated warnings from unions.
“This trial clearly demonstrates all the corruption of the Greek state, the corruption that killed our children,” Christos Vlahos, a parent of one of the victims said outside the courthouse.
The trial is expected to last several years.
Thirty-three of the defendants face criminal charges and risk prison sentences of up to life imprisonment.
None of the accused are currently in prison, though some have served time in pre-trial detention.
The head of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, Laura Kovesi, said the collision could have been avoided if the signalling system had been modernised in time using EU funds.
Train workers are staging a 24-hour strike Monday in what their union called “an act of collective remembrance, protest, and democratic vigilance”.
‘Killed Our People’
The accident – now commonly known as the “Tempe crime” — sparked widespread anger in the country that has never subsided.
Tens of thousands of people joined protests nationwide to mark the accident’s third anniversary last month.
They are accused of having committed “acts dangerous to the safety of railway traffic (…) resulting in the death of a large number of people and serious bodily injuries to a large number of people,” according to the indictment seen by AFP.
Managers and employees of the Hellenic Railways Organisation (OSE), the rail network operator, are also on trial, as well as two senior transport ministry officials and two Italian executives from Hellenic Train, a subsidiary of the Italian state’s Ferrovie dello Stato.
No political official will be in the dock, fuelling resentment at a time when the conservative government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has already fiercely criticised for what is widely seen as a disastrous handling of the accident.
There are also claims by the opposition and civil society that officials are shielding those responsible.
Communist party leader Dimitris Koutsoumbas on Monday told reporters the investigation was “hurriedly” closed, leaving “huge gaps” in the case.
He called it a “blatant cover-up”.
Two former ministers, including the ex-transport minister, Kostas Karamanlis, were also referred to justice by parliament, but face only misdemeanour charges at present.
“There are people who should be here as defendants, such as Kostas Karamanlis, who killed our people,” said Aslanidis.
Valuable evidence was also lost when, just days after the collision, a bulldozer levelled the site.
Despite the disaster, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis comfortably won re-election just months later, and went on to defeat two votes of no-confidence on the issue.
AFP
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