Tempi rail disaster: Funerals begin after harrowing ID process
The funeral for the first of nearly 60 victims of Greece’s worst rail disaster this week was held Friday as families began receiving the remains of their loved ones following a harrowing identification process.
Athina Katsara, a 34-year-old mother of an infant boy, was buried in her home town of Katerini, in the north of the country. Her injured husband was in hospital and unable to attend.
Families and friends, dressed in black, clung to each other, in tears, as her coffin was carried up the steps of a church.
Recovery teams spent a third day scouring the wreckage in Tempe, 380 kilometers north of Athens, where a passenger train slammed into a freight carrier just before midnight Tuesday.
Carriages were thrown off the tracks, some of them crushed and engulfed in flames, when a passenger train and one carrying freight collided on the same track at high speed, in central Greece.
The government has blamed human error and a railway official was charged Thursday with manslaughter, in an accident that shocked the nation and highlighted safety shortcomings in the small but dated rail network.
Checks of all the human remains recovered so far confirmed the death toll at 57, authorities said Friday.
The bodies were being returned to families in closed caskets following their identification through next-of-kin DNA samples — a process followed for all the remains.
