Stepped up police patrols along Greece’s oft-vandalized railroad lines and infrastructure on Wednesday resulted in five arrests in the Aspropyrgos district, with one of the suspects being a contractor’s employee accused of facilitating the theft of metal objects from the tracks.
Four of the suspects were identified as men aged 22, 26 and 39, while a 37-year-old woman was also arrested. Two vehicles loaded with what police said was metal parts from the tracks were confiscated. Felony charges were subsequently filed by a relevant prosecutor.
A unit of motorcycle police reportedly spotted the suspects at a rail-related construction site in the industrial and logistics district, which is located due west of the greater Athens area.
The fifth suspect, an employee of a private firm, was arrested and charged with taking bribes to allow and facilitate the theft.
Persistent and systematic looting and vandalism of Greece’s already under-funded railroad network by gangs stealing metals, especially copper, is among the biggest problems facing the beleaguered rail sector in the country.
According to initial reports at the time, the reason why a Larissa station master placed a northbound passenger train onto a southbound track on the fateful evening of Feb. 28, 2023 – in what should have been a brief diversion – was because theft on the north-bound line had rendered a stretch inoperable because electricity was cut. Failing to reroute the passenger train back to its correct track resulted in its head-on collision later in the evening with a south-bound freight train at the south end of the Tempi valley gorge in north-central Greece.
Lack of a functioning electronic monitoring system on all parts of the Larissa-Thessaloniki rail line also demonstrated the lack of fail-safe systems.
The Tempi rail disaster claimed the life of 52 people.
