Relatives of 57 passengers who died during the train collision at Tempi in central Greece in February filed charges against railroad officials and politicians, including the Prime Minister, against 17 people in total, on Tuesday.
According to Christos Konstantinidis, spokesperson for the association of victims’ relatives, the latter are suing the prime minister, related ministers of the current government and of previous governments, and railroad officials.
The lawsuit is reportedly directed against the administrations of OSE, Hellenic Train, the Energy Regulatory Authority and against political figures such as the prime minister, former minister of transport, current minister of transport, minister of transport of the two previous governments and against the former and current presidents and directors of OSE.
The lawsuit aims to seek potential responsibilities in the current and previous governments, as well as in railway executives.
The suit was filed with the prosecutor of the Larissa Appeals Court.
The aim is an investigation going back 15 years, to look for other liabilities that led to the deadly accident.
PM accuses relatives of “victims’ instrumentation”
Hearing of the lawsuit, the callous Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis accused the relatives of “instrumentation” of the victims ahead of the elections.
Speaking to ANT1 TV on Tuesday evening, Mitsotakis appeared particularly annoyed about the relatives’ lawsuit and claimed “unjustified behaviors,”
“I regret that this issue is instrumentalized in such a way a few days before the elections. I believe that the justified anger of the victims’ relatives does not justify this kind of behavior,” Mitsotakis said in showing not a glimpse empathy at least to the parents of the many young victims.
Speaking earlier to Kokkino FM, spokesperson fo the relatives association said that they filed a lawsuit against the prime minister, ministers and railway executives in order to start unraveling the tangle of responsibilities that the government is trying to hide.
In the lawsuit it is pointed out that apart from the then Transportation Minister, Kostas Karamanlis, “obviously he is not the only one to blame, as the main responsible is the prime minister himself.”
A passenger and a freight train traveling in opposite directions on the same Athens-Thessaloniki track collided late at night on February 28, 2023, killing 57 passengers, many of them young students returning to university after a long weekend. Over 170 people were injured.
