It only took seconds for hundreds of Greeks to turn a long weekend into a nightmare for the hundreds of Greeks involved in a deadly train crash on Tuesday night.
At least 36 people were killed on Tuesday when a high-speed passenger train bound for the northern city of Thessaloniki collided with an oncoming freight train, derailed and burst into flames 220 miles north of Athens.
According to witnesses, they felt a strong tremor, then a shock, then chaos.
“The windows were broken and people were screaming,” said a passenger in the fifth carriage. “One of the windows was blown out by the impact of the second train,” a passenger told Skai TV as he took refuge under a nearby bridge, his face lit up by the flames.
There were about 346 people on the train, passengers described two-thirds of them as full of young people.
“My child won’t pick up the phone,” said a woman waiting at the train station in Thessaloniki. Another woman ran with her daughter in her arms as she got off the bus with survivors. “Mom, no, I’m sick,” she said.
Many people are said to have returned home after a long weekend to mark the start of the Greek Orthodox Lent. Thessaloniki has a large number of students.
“There was panic, the cables were on fire (everywhere), the fire was immediate, we were on fire when we turned, the fire was going left and right,” said Stergios Minenis, a passenger. 28 years old.
Another passenger in one of the last carriages said he felt the train shake and then overturn.
“I managed to get out and went to the front, the train turned 90 degrees and went over a half-burning cliff. Five people were injured where I was,” he said.
As dawn broke, rescue teams waded through the wrecked, smoldering mass of steel as cranes slowly removed parts of the train.
Hours later, they still found victims. State television ERT showed the crew, who were believed to be victims, covered in white sheets and carefully placed in an ambulance.
(Reuters)
Disclaimer! insideheadline is an automatic aggregator of world media. All content is freely available on the Internet. We have organized it on one platform for educational purposes only. Each content is hyperlinked to the original source. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, and all materials belong to their authors. If you are a content owner and do not wish to publish your content on our website, please contact us Email address – (email protected). Content will be removed within 24 hours.
