KATERINI, Greece, March 3 (Reuters) – Families and friends, dressed in black, clung to each other, in tears, as the coffin of a 34-year-old mother killed in Greece’s deadliest train crash was lifted up the stairs of a church on Friday.
The first known funeral after Tuesday night’s accident, which killed at least 57, took place in the northern town of Katerini, as police said 52 bodies had so far been identified – almost all from DNA tests as the crash was so violent.
Carriages were thrown off the tracks, some of them crushed and engulfed in flames, when a passenger train and one carrying freight collided on the same track at high speed, in central Greece.
There were more than 350 people on board the passenger train, many of them university students going back to the northern town of Thessaloniki from the capital Athens after a long holiday weekend.
On Friday, 38 passengers were still hospitalised, seven of them in intensive care.
Latest Updates
View 2 more stories
Anger has grown across the country over the crash, which the government has attributed to human error but which unions say was inevitable due to lack of maintenance and faulty signalling.
“They killed him, that is what happened. They are murderers, all of them,” Panos Routsi said earlier on Friday as he and his wife waited with anguish for confirmation of what had happened to their 22-year-old son Denis.
Not long before the crash, his son had told him he would be late and would call. “I’m still waiting,” Routsi said, standing opposite the hospital in Larissa, not far from the site of the crash, where many of the victims were brought.
Denis had travelled to Athens to see friends and was returning home in the train that never reached its destination. His mother, Mirela, showed reporters a picture on her mobile of her son beaming.
After evening protests over the past two days, some 2,000 students took to the streets in Athens on Friday, blocking the road in front of parliament for a moment of silence. Students also demonstrated in Larissa, the central city near the crash.
“Their profits, our dead,” read one banner, signed by a university student organisation.
Another placard read: “It was not an accident, it was murder.”
Railway workers extended their strike to a second day on Friday, and more rallies were planned, as many demanded how such a tragedy could have happened.
PROTESTS
In school yards in Athens, students used their bags to write the words “Call me when you get there,” a phrase that has become one of the protest slogans.
Larissa’s 59-year-old station master was arrested and has admitted to some responsibility, his lawyer said, while stressing he was not the only one to blame.
“The federation has been sounding alarm bells for so many years, but it has never been taken seriously,” the main railworkers union said, demanding a meeting with the new transport minister, appointed after the crash with a mandate to ensure such a tragedy can never happen again.
The union said it wanted a clear timetable for the implementation of safety protocols.
Work continued at the crash site, where rescue staff used cranes to lift some carriages thrown off the tracks.
Opposition politicians also started to voice criticism.
“Any effort to hide and cover up the truth over the Tempi tragedy is disrespecting the dead and foretelling new tragedies,” said Popi Tsapanidou, a spokesperson for the leftwing Syriza, Greece’s main opposition party.
Before the crash, the government had said that elections would be held in the spring, with media citing April 9 as the most likely date. Political analysts say that plan might now be pushed back.
Reporting by Lefteris Papadimas in Larissa, Alexandros Avramidis in Katerini, and Karolina Tagaris, Renee Maltezou, Michele Kambas, Alkis Konstandinidis; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Christina Fincher
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
