Clashes with police as thousands protest over train tragedy

Greek police fired tear gas and protesters hurled firebombs on Thursday as more than 40,000 people took to the streets to slam the government and voice outrage at last month’s train disaster that killed 57 people.

The protests were accompanied by a 24-hour strike — the biggest yet since the disaster — this time called by Greece’s leading private as well as public sector unions.

Clashes erupted at Syntagma Square near parliament in Athens, where police fired tear gas and stun grenades at demonstrators hurling firebombs and rocks.

As protesters retreated, they smashed traffic lights and shop windows and set rubbish bins on fire, AFP reporters said.

A plainclothes police driver for a leftist MP was lightly hurt a demonstrator smashed his car window, said state television ERT.

Ten people were detained for questioning, police added.

The Feb 28 crash exposed decades of safety failings in Greek railways and has put major pressure on the conservative government ahead of national elections.

Police said 25,000 people protested in Athens on Thursday, as well as about 8,500 in each of the country’s next largest cities, Thessaloniki and Patras, where brief clashes also broke out, police said.

Thursday’s industrial walkout shut down the civil service, flights and ferries.

Many protesters urged the government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to resign over what is the country’s deadliest rail accident.

“This crime will not be forgotten,” demonstrators from the country’s communist union PAME chanted as the crowd marched towards parliament and the offices of rail services company Hellenic Train in Athens.

Students shouted “murderers” and marchers threw flyers of Mr Mitsotakis wearing a stationmaster’s cap, captioned “it’s everyone’s fault but mine”.

The rail disaster occurred shortly before midnight when a passenger train crashed head-on into a freight train in central Greece after both were mistakenly left running on the same track.

Most of the passengers were students returning from a holiday weekend.

“Things have to change in this country, we simply cannot mourn all these deaths,” said Athens’ protester Stavroula Hatzitheodorou, in reference to deadly wildfires that have gripped Greece in recent years as well as the train crash.

“We hope that things will change in these elections,” Mr Hatzitheodorou, who works in the private sector, told AFP.

A stationmaster and three other railway officials have been charged, but public anger has focused on long-running mismanagement of the network.