Thousands rally in new Greece protests over train crash

Hundreds of individuals have rallied in central Athens to protest over Greece’s deadliest rail catastrophe, which killed dozens of individuals final month.

The demonstrators expressed anger over security deficiencies in Greece’s railway community and demanded punishment for these answerable for the head-on collision between a passenger prepare and a freight prepare that killed 57 folks on February 28. Police mentioned that greater than 8,000 folks in Athens gathered exterior Parliament to protest on Sunday.

Protesters flooded Athens’s Syntagma Sq., waving banners that learn “We gained’t neglect, we gained’t forgive” and “We are going to develop into the voice of all of the useless”.

“It was anger and rage that introduced me right here,” Markella, a 65-year-old Athens protester who gave just one identify, informed the AFP information company.

One other demonstrator, 26-year-old Alexandros, added: “We’re getting determined. You don’t know what to say, what to do – all you are able to do is be part of the protest.”

The protesters later marched to the workplaces of privatised prepare operator Hellenic Prepare. The corporate, which has been owned by Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane since 2017, isn’t answerable for the upkeep of the railway community. State-owned Hellenic Railways is accountable for repairs.

Reporting from Athens, Al Jazeera’s John Psaropoulos mentioned “the message on the road at present … was one among scepticism and confrontation in the direction of the federal government”.

Authorities shut down 4 metro stations on two traces working by way of central Athens due to the protest.

The rally was organised by civil servants, a pro-communist union and college college students.

In Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest metropolis, about 5,000 folks demonstrated.

Sunday’s rallies, which handed off with out severe incident, weren’t as well-attended as comparable occasions earlier within the week, when greater than 30,000 had turned out in Athens and greater than 20,000 in Thessaloniki.

A memorial service was carried out for 12 college students of the Aristotle College of Thessaloniki, Greece’s largest college, who have been killed within the prepare crash.

A stationmaster accused of putting the trains on the identical observe has been charged with negligent murder and different offences, and the nation’s transportation minister and senior railway officers resigned the day after the crash.

Private and non-private sector workers are anticipated to stroll out once more on Thursday.

‘Facetious’ reactions

Revelations of significant security gaps on Greece’s busiest rail line have put the centre-right authorities of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on the defensive. He has pledged the federal government’s full cooperation with a judicial inquiry into the crash.

Mitsotakis, who’s preventing to be re-elected later this 12 months, has confronted calls from some protesters to stop.

He has come beneath hearth for initially pointing to “human error” for the accident, and blaming the stationmaster on obligation on the time, who allegedly routed the trains onto the identical stretch of observe accidentally.

However railway unions had lengthy been warning about issues on the creaking, understaffed prepare community.

Al Jazeera’s Psaropoulos mentioned the federal government “has been bending over backwards to appease public opinion.

“Simply two days in the past, the federal government introduced that it will pay for nationwide pensions equal to roughly $1,800 per household for every of these 57 folks killed,” he mentioned.

“The federal government is attempting to reassure those that by the top of the month when railways begin working once more – at the very least that’s the authorities plan – all precautions could have been taken to have full staffing and correctly skilled workers on platforms and on trains.

“By the top of the summer season, the prime minister has promised he’s going to have all these automated security methods that didn’t work on the evening of February 28, put in all through the system – computerized signalling, computerized breaking and telemetry exhibiting controllers the place trains are and headed always.”

Elections in Greece are due later this spring, and opinion polls launched over the previous week have proven the ruling conservatives’ lead over the left-wing opposition shrink nearly by half in contrast with polls printed earlier than the crash.