More than 15,000 people took part in new protests in Athens this Sunday triggered by the train crash that killed 57 people on February 28, with protesters blaming the government for infrastructure deterioration.
Thousands of workers and students marched through the center of the Greek capital to demand justice and denounce the privatization policies in the railway sector, according to police.
“Privatizations cost lives” and “You are murderers,” read banners held by protesters in front of the Greek parliament.
Traffic was cut off on several central streets in Athens and metro stations were also closed.
“We will not leave them alone. We will not let this crime be forgotten,” said General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), Dimitris Kutsumbas, who took part in the protest.
Thousands of university students and workers also took to the streets in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city, to protest government policies.
Greece has been facing massive protests for almost two weeks over the accident on the night of February 28, when a passenger train collided head-on with a freight train north of the town of Larissa, killing 57 people, most of them university students.
The mobilizations will continue next week, as part of a 24-hour general strike called on Thursday by the public and private sector unions, whose main demand is that the “real culprits” be found for Larisa’s “crime”.
Last Wednesday, more than 40,000 people, according to police, and up to 60,000, according to some media outlets, demonstrated in Athens as part of a public sector general strike, one of the largest mobilizations in the country in recent years.
The Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, took political responsibility for the accident, acknowledging that there were no safety measures in the section where the disaster occurred that could have prevented it.
So far, four employees of the state-owned railway company OSE have been charged, including a station master who admitted to the prosecutor that he put the passenger train on the same track as a freight train coming from the opposite direction.
The accident and the wave of public outcry it caused took place less than two months before the general election, the date of which has not yet been set, although the most likely day for its celebration is May 21, according to the Greek press.
Source: DN
