Passenger train crashes with cargo in Greece, 32 dead

A head-on crash between two trains in Greece has killed at least 32 people and hurt dozens more. As per reports, the incident happened on Tuesday night, when a passenger train going from Athens to the northern city of Thessaloniki crashed into a cargo train coming from Thessaloniki.

The crash happened outside the city of Larissa, which is in the middle of the country. Some of the passenger cars caught fire when they hit the ground.

Stergios Minenis, a 28-year-old passenger who jumped to safety from the wreckage, said, “We heard a big bang, and it was 10 nightmare seconds.”

“The waggon flipped over until we fell on our sides”. Then there was panic, cables were everywhere, and fire broke out right away. As we turned over, we were getting burned on both sides.

The governor of the Thessaly region, Konstantinos Agorastos, told SKAI TV that the crash caused the first four cars of the passenger train to go off the tracks. The first two cars caught fire and were “almost completely destroyed.”

He said that the two trains were coming at each other at full speed on the same track.

The governor said, “They were going very fast, and one driver didn’t know the other was coming.”

SKAI showed video of derailed carriages with overturned cargo containers and wreckage all over a nearby road. Rescue workers with powerful torches were looking through the wreckage for people who were stuck inside. Some people were looking for survivors in the fields around them.

“We are in the middle of a tragedy. We’re pulling out people who are alive, hurt, and even dead. “We’ll be here all night, until we’re done, or until we find the last person,” a volunteer rescue worker told ERT.

Hellenic Train, which runs the train, said that about 350 people were on it when it left Athens at about 7:30 p.m. (17:30 GMT). The fire department said they found out about the accident just before midnight.

After the crash, an emergency meeting of the government was set up, and the Greek health minister, Thanos Plevris, went to the scene.

As part of its international bailout programme, Greece sold the train company TRAINOSE to Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane in 2017. The country hoped that hundreds of millions of euros would be used to improve rail infrastructure.