Five OSE insiders got hold of audio files of Tempe train crash

Five people, most of them senior managers at state-run Hellenic Railways Organisation (OSE) which operates the rail network, gained access to the organization’s audio files from the night of the train collision at Tempe in the early hours of March 1, 2023, railway executives told Kathimerini on condition of anonymity.

The audio files include the transmissions of the Larissa stationmaster on duty on February 28 – who routed two trains travelling in opposite directions on the same line – and his conversations with train drivers on the night of the accident. 

OSE also knows the identity of the employee who extracted the files from the company server and the exact time he uploaded it to a hard disk, the same sources said. But the informal internal investigation that took place days later did not clarify which of those five people leaked a tampered version to the press, just hours after the accident.

According to the OSE executives, at around 4 a.m. on March 1, just a few hours after the tragic accident, an OSE employee at the organization’s headquarters on Karolou Street entered the server room following an order of his immediate supervisor and downloaded the files on a hard drive. He then passed them on to his supervisor, who in turn forwarded them by email at about 8 a.m. to three senior OSE managers, after turning them into a compressed file (zip file).

At 5 p.m. on March 1, a compilation of two separate audio files from the transmissions of the Larissa stationmaster was published on the news website Proto Thema.

Some of the recipients of the emails containing the audio files claim that they first heard the conversations on the radio while travelling back from the scene of the accident. That is when an informal internal probe reportedly followed which did not reveal which of the recipients forwarded it to the press. 

The complete audio files were handed over to the police on March 3, according to the Hellenic Police. 

OSE workers’ union had filed a complaint to the competent prosecutor over the leaks to the press but sources indicate that there has been no development in this matter since.

In his lengthy testimony to the Parliament’s investigative committee on the accident, Panagiotis Terezakis, head of OSE, provided a different account of the events of that day. As he had stated at the time, it was he – and not an OSE employee – together with a police officer, who took the audio files on March 1 to pass them on to the competent preliminary investigation authority, that is, the Traffic Police in Larissa (the city closer to the scene of the accident). 

After questions arose over the tampering of the leaked audio files, sources close to Terezakis said that the audio files he took were not those of the stationmaster’s transmissions, but those containing electronic signaling data. The same sources said that Terezakis, a police officer and two experts from the Larissa Traffic Police took the files from the Larissa Railway Station, not OSE’s headquarters, as originally stated. 

This inconsistency in the narration of events is attributed to a mistake during the deposition. 

For unknown reasons, the acquisition of the signaling files was recorded by a police officer with his mobile phone and there is a protocol of the delivery and receipt of the files dated March 1, 2023, which also bears the signature of a representative of the TOMI-Alstom consortium, which was responsible for implementing the – yet undelivered – Contract 717 for the remote signaling and railway control projects.

The claim that five people received the disputed audio files can be confirmed or denied by the ongoing official investigation by inviting them to testify.

Fifty-seven people, many of them university students heading back home after a long weekend, died in the Tempe train crash, while numerous others were left injured. It is Greece’s deadliest railway accident to date.