Greece train tragedy hunger striker vows to go ‘to the end’

Source: Euractiv

The father of a young man killed in Greece’s worst rail tragedy in 2023, vowed on Saturday to continue his 20-day hunger strike “to the end” to demand answers on his son’s death.

“I will go to the end. I will stay here even if I die. I am not leaving till my demand is justified…. I want to learn how my child died,” Panos Ruci told Mega TV.

Ruci, whose 22-year-old son Denis died in the crash, has been protesting in front of parliament and refusing food since September 15 over prosecutors’ refusal to allow an exhumation of his son’s body.

Doctors monitoring Ruci on Friday said he has lost nearly 9% of his body weight and is “at high risk of serious complications” to his health.

57 people, most of them young students, were killed in February 2023 when a passenger train and a freight train collided near Tempe, central Greece, having been allowed to run on the same track for 12 minutes.

The tragedy sparked sweeping strikes and hundreds of protests in Greece and abroad, denouncing the country’s failure to properly investigate the accident.

Opinion polls have shown a large majority of Greeks believe the government tried to cover up evidence into the cause of the crash. The victims’ families believe valuable evidence was lost when the crash site was bulldozed soon after the accident.

The investigation ended at the end of August.

A senior judge in Larissa this week ordered 36 people to face trial, including Greek railway officials, executives of Italian-owned operating company Hellenic Train, and the stationmaster on duty of the night of the accident.

But several families wanted more toxicology tests to determine whether one of the trains was carrying undeclared chemicals that caused an explosion after the crash.

Government officials say that reopening the investigation will only delay the trial, which is not expected to begin until early next year.

They say the families can still submit exhumation requests once the trial begins.

jph/rmb

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