Teenager saved Greek train crash victims from ‘fiery hell’

A TEENAGER has described how he saved the lives of other passengers in the “fiery hell” of Greece’s train disaster, as the death toll rose to 57.

Angelos Tsiamouras, 18, was one of 350 people on the passenger service that smashed into a freight train head on. He emerged relatively unscathed because he was in the sixth carriage back from the impact point, and ran to the front carriages to help the injured.

The first carriage had disintegrated while the second was engulfed in flames, he said.

He rushed to the third and fourth carriages and began helping people out of the wreckage. In the third carriage, there were “many dead”.

He said: “You couldn’t do much, unfortunately. The fire had spread. It was like a fiery hell.” Together with a friend, he managed to help 16 people out of the derailed train.

Andreas Alikaniotis, a 20-year-old student, was also hailed a hero after saving 10 passengers by smashing a train window so they could escape. He and his friends threw luggage on to the ground outside to soften the fall for people jumping out of the windows.

“It was a steep drop into a ditch,” Mr Alikaniotis, who suffered a knee injury, said from his hospital bed.

Emergency crews yesterday continued cutting through the charred and twisted wreckage, looking for the remains of the dead.

Forensics experts are having to use DNA to identify many victims because they were so badly burnt.

About 50 people remain in hospital, six of whom are in intensive care.

Investigators are working to ascertain how the two trains came to be travelling in opposite directions on the same track.

A stationmaster in nearby Larissa, who was arrested in the wake of the accident, was yesterday charged with manslaughter through negligence.

The 59-year-old assumes some responsibility for the disaster but insists that other factors were also at play, his lawyer said.