Greek PM, officials sued by victims of rail tragedy

A passenger train collided with a freight train shortly before midnight on February 28

A group representing the 57 victims of the head-on collision of two trains in Greece last February said on Tuesday that it had filed a criminal lawsuit against Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and other ministers and officials ahead of Sunday's national election.

"The lawsuit targets... the prime minister, ministers and ex-ministers" in addition to other officials, group representative Christos Konstantinidis, whose wife died in the country's worst rail disaster, told reporters in the central city of Larissa.

A passenger train collided with a freight train shortly before midnight on February 28 after being mistakenly allowed to run on the same track.

Thirty of the 57 people killed were under 30 years old, many of them university students.

The disaster prompted tens of thousands of people to take to the streets to vent fury with the government, which for the last eight years has been led by the conservative Mitsotakis or his main rival, leftist Alexis Tsipras.

The former head of rail network company OSE, who was forced to resign after the tragedy, has already been prosecuted for breach of duty.

The stationmaster on duty during the crash is being held in pre-trial detention on charges of endangering public transport and negligent homicide, facing up to a life sentence if convicted.

Three other railway officials - two other stationmasters and a shift supervisor - have also been charged in connection with the disaster.

The transport minister resigned after the disaster. He is again a candidate in Sunday's elections.

The government drew fire after initially trying to place the blame squarely on the stationmaster on duty.

Railway unions had long been warning about safety risks, claiming the network was underfunded and understaffed after a decade of spending cuts, and prone to accidents.

Mitsotakis later apologised and vowed to improve rail safety in co-operation with EU experts and French rail operator SNCF.

Only parliament can set up a special court to investigate the prime minister and ministers.

A probe by Greece's rail watchdog said it had uncovered serious signs of poor training among staff on duty on the night of the accident.

The Regulatory Authority for Railways (RAS) said the shortcomings constituted an "immediate and serious" threat to public safety, after finding "lack of proof" that recently hired stationmasters had completed the required basic training.

OSE is widely thought to have been mismanaged for decades, and successive Greek governments were investigated by the EU for hundreds of millions of euros in illegal state aid to the company.

Greece was ultimately forced to break up the company during the bailout cuts that accompanied the country's decade-long debt crisis.

The Greek state kept ownership of the network, but rail services were sold to Italy's State-owned Ferrovie Dello Stato Italiane (FS) in 2017.