Funerals begin after train tragedy in Greece
KATERINI, Greece — The funeral for the first of nearly 60 victims of Greece’s worst rail disaster this week was Friday as families began receiving the remains of loved ones following a difficult identification process.
Athina Katsara, a 34-yearold mother of an infant boy, was being buried in her home town of Katerini, Greece. Her injured husband was in a hospital and unable to attend.
Recovery teams spent a third day scouring the wreckage in Tempe, 235 miles north of Athens, where a passenger train slammed into a freight carrier just before midnight Tuesday.
The government has blamed human error, and a railway official was charged Thursday with manslaughter, in an accident that highlighted safety shortcomings in the small but dated rail network.
Checks of all the human remains recovered so far confirmed the death toll at 57, authorities said Friday.
The force of the head-on collision and resulting fire complicated the task of determining the death toll. Officials matched parts of dismembered and burned bodies with tissue samples to establish the number.
The bodies were being returned to families in closed caskets following their identification through next-of-kin DNA samples — a process followed for all the remains. Relatives of passengers still listed as unaccounted-for waited outside a hospital in the central city of Larissa for test results.
Anger in the wake of the tragedy grew over reports that the rail network lacked adequate safeguards to reduce the impact of human error.
Not far from the hospital in Larissa, several thousand schoolchildren gathered in protest in a central square, chanting “You never arrived, we will avenge you!”