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ATHENS — Greece’s newly-appointed transport minister stated he was taking up on Thursday with a mandate to analyze the nation’s deadliest practice crash, to modernize an ailing railway system and to revive security in practice journey.
“It’s a very heavy duty,” Giorgos Gerapetritis informed reporters throughout handover on the ministry.
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The federal government has confronted harsh criticism for the state of its railway system since an intercity practice collided head-on with a cargo practice on Tuesday evening, killing at the very least 46 folks, lots of them college students of their 20s, and injuring dozens.
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“We’re going via days which are actually darkish for our nation,” Gerapetritis stated.
The catastrophe has led to a nationwide outpouring of grief and anger. On Thursday, trains had been delivered to a halt in a day of strike towards what unions stated was successive governments’ refusal to listen to repeated calls for to enhance security requirements.
Gerapetritis stated the federal government was establishing a committee of consultants to analyze “in a clear method” the explanations of the crash in addition to “the abnormalities, the passivity that has existed over time.”
The high-speed passenger practice collided with one other carrying delivery containers, coming in the other way and on the identical monitor, at speeds considered as much as 160 km (100 miles) per hour.
A station grasp was arrested as investigators tried to work out why the 2 trains had been on the identical monitor. (Reporting by Karolina Tagaris; Enhancing by Frank Jack Daniel)
