Parliament votes to investigate former transport minister

A parliamentary session filled with acrimony ended in the early hours of Thursday with a decision to investigate former transport minister Kostas A. Karamanlis over the 2023 Tempe rail disaster.

The vote was carried out by secret ballot, with 154 lawmakers upholding the proposal submitted by governing New Democracy – which has 155 seats in the House.

It paves the way for a special parliamentary committee that will determine whether Karamanlis’ immunity should be waived so he can face criminal indictment for any actions or oversights that contributed to the deadly collision at the Vale of Tempe in central Greece, which cost 57 lives.

Leftist opposition SYRIZA and New Left, as well as the Greek Communist Party (KKE), abstained from the vote on procedural grounds.

Karamanlis, a member of the ruling center-right New Democracy party, served as transport and infrastructure minister from 2019 to 2023, when he resigned over the crash, which involved the head-on collision of a passenger train and a freight train traveling in opposite directions on the same track.

He has been accused of failing to carry out a long-delayed project for upgrading the railway’s signalling and remote control systems that could have prevented the crash.

Source: pagenews.gr