Anger builds over train crash deaths
Protests, some violent, spread through Greece
ATHENS, Greece — Protests have intensified in Greece days after the country’s deadliest rail disaster, as thousands of students took to the streets in several cities and some protesters clashed with police in Athens.
At least 57 people — including several university students — died when a passenger train slammed into a freight carrier just before midnight Tuesday. The government has blamed human error and a railway official faces manslaughter charges.
Friday night’s violence was not extensive, and the protests were otherwise peaceful. Clashes also occurred in Greece’s second largest city, Thessaloniki.
In Athens, riot police outside parliament fired tear gas and flash grenades to disperse a small number of protesters who hurled petrol bombs at them, set fire to garbage bins and challenged police cordons. No arrests or injuries were reported.
The protests called by left-wing and student groups were fueled by anger at the perceived lack of safety measures in Greece’s rail network. The largest on Friday was in the central Greek city of Larissa, not far from the crash site, where several thousand people marched peacefully. Similar protests were held Wednesday and Thursday.
The accident at Tempe, 235 miles north of Athens, shocked the nation and highlighted safety shortcomings in the small but dated rail network.
As recovery teams spent a third day scouring the wreckage Friday and families began receiving the remains of their loved ones, the funeral for the first of the victims was held in northern Greece.
Athina Katsara, a 34-year-old mother of an infant boy, was buried in her home town of Katerini. Her injured husband was in the hospital and unable to attend.
The force of the head-on collision and resulting fire complicated the task of determining the death toll. Officials worked around the clock to match parts of dismembered and burned bodies with tissue samples to establish the number.
The bodies were returned to families in closed caskets following 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 Larissa hospital for test results.