ATHENS — The station master at Greece’s Larissa railway station was detained pending trial on Sunday, his lawyer said, on charges related to the country’s deadliest train crash on record.
The man was arrested on March 1, hours after a passenger train with more than 350 people on board collided head-on with a freight train near the city of Larissa, in central Greece, killing at least 57 people injuring scores more.
Felony charges were brought on Thursday against the 59-year-old who cannot be named under Greek law, for disrupting transport and putting lives at risk. He appeared before a magistrate on Sunday to respond to the charges.
“It was expected due to the significance of the case, the burden, the responsibility,” his lawyer Stefanos Pantzartzidis told reporters, adding that his client was “devastated” and had told the magistrate “the truth without fear.”
On Thursday, he said that his client had assumed responsibility “proportionate to him,” but other factors were also at play, without elaborating.
Greek railway unions have long complained of slipping safety standards, which place both passengers and workers at risk.
Also on Sunday, clashes erupted briefly between police and a group of demonstrators in central Athens on the fringes of a protest by thousands of students and railway workers over the crash.
A small group of protesters hurled petrol bombs at police, who responded with tear gas and hand grenades, before dispersing to nearby streets.
The train, travelling from Athens to the northern city of Thessaloniki, was packed with university students returning after a long holiday weekend. The disaster has triggered an outpouring of anger, as well as a sharp focus on safety standards.
Railway workers, who also lost colleagues in the accident, have staged rotating walkouts since Wednesday to denounce cost-cutting and underinvestment in the rail infrastructure, a legacy of Greece’s debilitating debt crisis from 2010 to 2018.
