Greek Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis resigned on Wednesday after a passenger train collided with a freight train that left at least 36 dead and dozens injured on Tuesday night.
Karamanlis stated that he considered it his “duty” to resign “as a simple matter of respect for the memory of the people who died so unjustly.”
The causes of the head-on collision that took place Tuesday night near the Tempe Valley, some 380 kilometers north of Athens, are still unknown, but the head of the railway station in the nearby town of Larissa has been detained by police, who has not revealed his name.
Two other people were also detained for questioning by the police. According to firefighters, at least 66 people had to be hospitalized, six of them in intensive care.
Passengers who suffered minor injuries or who escaped unharmed were transported by bus to Thessaloniki, 130 kilometers north of the country.
The Hellenic Train railway company said the passenger train, which connected Athens with the northern city of Thessaloniki, was carrying around 350 people at the time of the crash.
It is not known how fast the two trains were traveling when they collided head-on on Tuesday just before midnight, but Greek public broadcaster ERT reported they were traveling at more than 140 kilometers per hour.
Survivors reported that the impact threw several passengers through the carriage’s windows and ERT quoted members of the rescue teams as saying that they had found the bodies of some victims between 30 and 40 meters from the crash site.
Several carriages derailed and at least three caught fire. This Wednesday a carriage could be seen on top of what was left of two others.
“Temperatures reached 1,300 degrees Celsius, making it even more difficult to identify the people inside” the passenger train, fire department spokesman Vassilis Varthakoyiannis said.
According to authorities, many of the 350 people aboard the passenger train were students returning home from celebrating Greece’s lively carnival.
This was the first year that the three-day festivities, which precede Lent, have been celebrated in their entirety since the start of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis declared at the scene of the accident that the government must help the injured recover and identify the fatalities.
“One thing I can guarantee: we will find out the causes of this tragedy and we will do everything in our power to ensure that nothing like this happens again,” Mitsotakis said.
The Government today declared three days of national mourning and flags were flown at half mast at all the European Commission buildings in Brussels.
Source: TSF
