The trial opened in the central city of Larissa, near where a freight train and a passenger train collided on 28 February 2023. Thirty-six people face charges and over 350 witnesses are due to be heard at the trial. Among those to testify are survivors and family members of the victims, some of whom are believed to have burned to death after surviving the initial collision.
Most of the dead were students returning from a carnival weekend. The accused include the station manager on duty on the night of the accident, other railway officials and two Italian former employees of the trains' parent company, Ferrovie dello Stato. The two trains had run on the same track for more than 10 minutes without triggering an alarm.
The disaster exposed the parlous state of the Greek railway network's safety systems – despite EU grants for their modernisation, and repeated warnings from unions. Thirty-three of the defendants face criminal charges and risk prison sentences of up to life imprisonment. None of the accused are currently in prison, though some have served time in pre-trial detention.
Train workers are staging a 24-hour strike Monday in what their union has called 'an act of collective remembrance, protest, and democratic vigilance'. Because of the number of participants, the trial was moved to a lecture hall at the University of Thessaly in Larissa. The accident – now commonly known in Greece as the 'Tempe crime' – sparked widespread anger in the country that has never subsided.
Tens of thousands of people joined protests nationwide to mark the accident's third anniversary last month. The accused include Vassilios Samaras, the duty station manager who was arrested the day after the collision, and two other station managers who had left their posts before the end of their shift. They are accused of having committed 'acts dangerous to the safety of railway traffic ...
resulting in the death of a large number of people and serious bodily injuries to a large number of people'. Managers and employees of the Hellenic Railways Organisation (OSE), the rail network operator, are also on trial, as well as two senior transport ministry officials and two Italian executives from Hellenic Train, a subsidiary of Ferrovie dello Stato. No political official will be in the dock.
Laura Kövesi, head of the European Public Prosecutor's Office, stated that the collision could have been avoided if the signalling system had been modernised in time using EU funds. ' The specific safety system failures or human errors that directly caused the collision have not been determined. Why no political officials were charged despite the disaster exposing systemic issues in the railway network remains unclear.
The trial is expected to last several years.