Tempe Trial: Motions for mobile phones of station master and Nalbantis – Summonses for Georgiadis and Markopoulos
The court is examining three motions today in the Tempe trial, with 13 witnesses testifying in the fourth week of proceedings.
Tempe Trial: Expert examinations on mobile phones and summonses of politicians in focus
The trial into the Tempe tragedy enters its fourth week of testimony from victims' relatives, with 13 witnesses being examined today. According to naftemporiki.gr, the court is to rule on three motions concerning expert examinations of mobile telephones and the summonses of two political figures.
Two of the three motions concern the official mobile phone of Nikolaos Nalbantis, assistant driver of the passenger train, and the device of the accused station master of the night shift.
The Nalbantis family is seeking to establish whether he attempted to communicate with the station master or another person after the train departed from Larissa Railway Station on the evening of 28 February. The official telephone had been handed over by the police to his fiancée following the accident.
A similar motion concerns the station master's mobile phone, which was seized after the collision: it is being sought to verify whether there was an attempted communication with the driver of the passenger train, Georgios Koutsoumba. The prosecutor has already recommended that this motion be accepted, proposing the lifting of confidentiality and laboratory expert examination for calls, messages, data from applications such as Viber, as well as recovery of any deleted files. Both the lawyers supporting the prosecution and the station master's defence counsel were in favour.
The third motion concerns the summonses as witnesses of Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis and New Democracy deputy Dimitris Markopoulos. According to Nalbantis family lawyer Othon Papadopoulos, the summons of Georgiadis is connected to a public statement he made a few days after the accident concerning whether citizens would have boarded trains if the then Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis had publicly stated a safety problem. The motion regarding Markopoulos relates to his role as chair of the parliamentary inquiry committee for Tempe.
The presiding judge had announced the previous week that a ruling would be sought today on the motion concerning the station master's mobile phone. For the two newer motions, the prosecutor's proposal is expected first.
In the dock are a total of 36 former and current officials from organisations and bodies of Greek railways, including officials from OSE, ERGOSE, Hellenic Train, RAS and the Transport Ministry. Thirty-three of them face charges of dangerous interference with fixed-track transport means with possible criminal intent, from which deaths, serious bodily injuries and significant damage resulted. This charge carries a penalty of up to life imprisonment.
Source: Google News GR — Crime (el)