Train crash in Greece: Relatives’ anguish and anger over lack of information

Almost three days after a deadly train crash in Greece, families screamed in anger and despair, with no information about the fate of their loved ones on board.

“No one can tell me anything. If my child is injured, if he is in intensive care. Nothing”, says Kalliopi, the mother of a 23-year-old student returning from Athens with her boy. friend

The woman, who did not want to be identified, has been desperately trying to get information about her daughter since Tuesday evening, but has been unable to get any in Thessaloniki, the country’s second city where her child lives. AFP met her in hospital from Larissa, the closest city to the accident.

It is in this hospital that the delicate work of identifying the bodies is going on.

After conducting an experiment that makes it possible to collect their DNA, she and her husband wait anxiously to find out if their daughter is one of the bodies burned or crushed in the train accident, according to a tentative fate. Report.

But doctors told them: “We won’t have quick answers on the identity”.

Frustrated, she says to herself, “Angry, so angry.”

– Congestion –

“My daughter and I spoke (Tuesday) at 9.30pm (1930 GMT) and all she told me was that the train was full of people,” he said.

The accident took place shortly before midnight between a passenger train and a freight train traveling in the opposite direction on the same track.

Her husband, Lazarus, 49, says he was notified of the accident by accident on television: “I woke up my wife and asked her: Wasn’t our child traveling on this train? Our ordeal began there”.

At the height of their anxiety, they hurried to the Thessaloniki station, where the young woman was due to arrive late on Tuesday evening.

At the railway company, Galliobi’s mother says she faced a wall, without any information from the management.

“They never picked up their phones. Only a security guard came out to inform us,” he says.

In the Larissa hospital, he denounces the lack of information:

“They told me: ‘You’re going to have a hard time’.

She is in despair: “Don’t treat parents like that. You can’t tell someone in the dark, you’re going to have a hard time, you have to be strong too”.