Tens of thousands of people gathered on Friday in Athens and other Greek cities to commemorate the second anniversary of the railway tragedy, which claimed the lives of 57 people, mostly students. As the AFP recalled, an accident that took place on February 28, 2023 near Larisa, a train from Athens to Thessaloniki with more than 350 passengers collided with a freight train.
Assemblies and worship were held in Athens for victims of an accident
About 200,000 people gathered on Syntagma Syntagma Square in Athens. More than 5,000 cops are deployed in the capital to handle crowds and potential riots. In the meantime, the AFP in front of the Parliament building occurred clashes between a group of young men with incendiary bottles and police, which used tear gas.
In Orthodox temples in Athens, there will be worship services for victims – among them there were many university students who returned to schools from an extended weekend. That is why many pupils came to school dressed in black on Friday.
Assembly are scheduled in more than 300 cities in Greece and abroad – eg. in New York or Melbourne, where a large Greek community lives.
As the AP reported on Friday, the strike in Greece is seriously disturbed by air, rail and public transport, and transportation by ferry is also limited. The private sector and public services joined the strike.
Friday’s protests are reflected in the growing anger of people in Greece, where after the debt crisis in 2009-2018, in which millions lost their wages and pensions and public services suffered from insufficient financing, people do not believe politicians.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis promised in his statement to the tragedy that his government would continue to work to improve the safety of railways.
The opposition parties intend to convene a vote of mistrust of the government next week. In addition, Parliament continues to investigate whether the relevant units did not destroy the consequences of the disaster too quickly, which could lead to the destruction of important evidence.
AP reported that a public opinion survey for the Alpha TV from this month shows that 72 percent of respondents believe that the government has tried to compensate the whole case – there are more than 40 percent of the government party voters among people with this view. More than two -thirds (67 percent) of respondents said they had little or no confidence in the court’s accident investigation and 81 percent have declared that the government did not make the accident enough to make train travel safer.
However, the Cabinet strongly rejects the accusations of the opposition parties that it is worth a “organized plan”, which aims to protect high officials from responsibility for railway misfortune.
Government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis stated this week that “one of the goals of a large part of the opposition is to trigger voltage, explosion in society”.
AP notes that the public dissatisfaction after the tragedy in Laris has led to Greece to increase support for non -systemic parties on the left and right side of the political spectrum.
The long -awaited report on the Laris tragedy investigation was published on Thursday. It states that the frontal collision of a passenger and freight train was to blame a human factor, outdated rail infrastructure and serious systemic errors.
This tragedy is the most serious railway accident in Greece. Mountain Greece is largely dependent on roads. The railway infrastructure is concentrated around the only route between Athens and the second largest city of Thessaloniki.
