A Spanish court on Friday sentenced a train driver and ex-safety director to 2.5 years in prison over a 2013 crash that was the nation’s deadliest rail disaster in nearly eight decades.
The train was travelling more than twice the speed limit when it derailed on the outskirts of the city of Santiago de Compostela (Galicia), killing dozens of people.
The court found the two men guilty of manslaughter, saying they had ‘breached the duty of care imposed on them by their duties’.
Prosecutors had sought four-year prison sentences for the driver, Francisco Garzón, and Andrés Cortabitarte, former safety director at state rail operator ADIF.
A probe of the 24 July 2013 derailment showed that the eight-carriage, high-speed Alvia 04155 was travelling at 179 kilometres per hour, twice the speed limit for that stretch of track.
The train ploughed into a concrete siding, killing 80 people and injuring over 140 others injured in Spain’s deadliest train tragedy since 1944.
Investigators said the tragedy resulted from a lapse in attention by the driver, who ended a phone call with the on-board conductor just moments before the train lurched off the rails.
When he took the stand, Garzón acknowledged he was distracted by the phone call but said the track should have had signals warning him to reduce speed before the curve. He tearfully apologised to the relatives of the victims.
Garzón had already apologised to relatives of the victims in a letter published on the one-year anniversary of the accident, saying he felt ‘a lot of grief and pain’.
Cortabitarte, as the former safety director at ADIF, was accused of not having carried out a study of the risks of the bend where the accident happened.
The court ruled the accident would not have happened ‘not only if the driver had been attentive, but also if measures had been taken to control the speed of the train in an area with a very high speed limit, or even to draw the driver’s attention to his obligation to slow down in a more obvious way than was the case’.
In its 530-page judgement, the court found the driver and the former ADIF official were directly responsible for the deaths of 79 of the 80 people who died following the accident.
The 80th victim, who was injured in the accident and died 73 days later following a serious illness, was not considered by the court to have been directly caused by the accident and was instead counted among the injured.
The defendants and the insurance companies of ADIF and Renfe were sentenced to pay 25 million euros in damages to the victims of the civil part of the trial.
🔹 Sentencia por el juicio de Alvia
Jesús Domínguez, presidente de la Asociación de Víctimas del Alvia 04155: “Muy satisfechos porque tuvimos que irnos a Europa (…) y al final alguien valiente e independiente nos da la razón a 11 años de lucha”.https://t.co/K5XlAXaZAx pic.twitter.com/z98gL72Au4
— RTVE Noticias (@rtvenoticias) July 26, 2024
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