2023-07-27 21:05:38
After 10 months of trial and 10 years since the railway tragedy that occurred on July 24, 2013, the sessions of the Alvia case, held in the Cidade da Cultura de Santiago, have come to an end with the silence of the two defendants, the driver Francisco Garzón Amo and ADIF Traffic Safety director at the time the high-speed line was launched, Andrés Cortabitarte, who each face up to four years in prison. Both have given up the opportunity to express their last word after a long morning in which the two lawyers representing them have presented their final reports. Eight years of investigation remain behind, with two false closings before the final one, which arrived in April 2021. The case accumulates, according to judicial sources, some 70,000 pages in addition to some 200 separate pieces on the victims, 80 deceased passengers and 145 injured . And the sentence, according to the same sources, will probably wait until the “spring of 2024”, between March and June of next year. The last session ended with tears from the driver, who needed to wipe his eyes with a handkerchief when his lawyer asserted the extenuating circumstances of confession, pardon and undue delay. The trial also closed with shouts outside. Both at the entrance and at the exit, victims gathered at the doors called the state lawyers (Adela Álvarez and Javier Suárez) “liars”, “scoundrels”, “sellouts” and even “psychopaths” who have defended the public company ADIF (Administrator of Railway Infrastructures) in this process. The same boos were heard referring to Andrés Cortabitarte. Those reproaches were directed at him and that of “you have blood-stained hands”. Against the prosecutor Mario Piñeiro, who in the last stretch of the trial withdrew the accusation against the former head of ADIF, no voices have been heard because he has left through another door.
In a statement released while the last day marked in the trial calendar of the Alvia case was taking place, the Platform for Victims has reviewed the actions of the State Attorney’s Office in its role as defender of Adif (not Renfe) to prevent the company has to respond to the million-dollar compensation that is claimed. “The State machinery has tried to delay this trial as long as possible,” denounced the victims of the accident, “hiding and delaying the delivery of vital documents for up to four years, as several documents pointed out; with the change of judge by the General Council of the Judiciary; with the Xunta imposing experts without railway experience; with the Prosecutor’s Office and the State Attorney’s Office working for ADIF”. “The cynical attitude of the State Attorney’s Office has generated even more pain, if possible, in the victims,” lamented the survivors and relatives of the deceased that this platform brings together.
Ignacio Sánchez, the lawyer representing the prosecuted former ADIF traffic security director in this trial, has defended this morning that “everything in ADIF and everything in Renfe has been done well except for the conduct of the driver”. In his last opportunity before the case was seen for sentencing, during a speech that lasted more than an hour, the defense lawyer for the only public office that has come to the bench (although at some moments of the eight years of instruction they came to be investigated more than 30) has requested his free acquittal. Sánchez has criticized a “prospective” instruction against Cortabitarte and a process in which “the focus is placed” on his client, marked by a photo that went around the world, on the day of the accident, in which the bloody driver appeared and which, in the eyes of the lawyer, presented him as “one more victim”.
“The victims have been doubly victims”, Sánchez insisted in his presentation of Cortabitarte as the scapegoat: “because they have suffered the most tragic situation” and because “they have lived through this hyperbolic process in search of a villain who would accompany the driver to trial ”. But “neither here nor abroad is it known what action my defendant is reproached for”, the lawyer for the former head of Traffic Safety has disfigured, “it is not known what he is being accused of”, but he is put as “a kind of de Cid Campeador of the entire railway system”. “Now it seems that everything falls into the certificate,” he stated, referring to the document he signed endorsing the safety of the line between Ourense and Santiago.
The private and popular accusation, exercised by the lawyers of the victims, almost a hundred parties, highlight the need for a comprehensive risk assessment of this high-speed line that was starting up and that ADIF did not do, a railway line in the one that, in the section of the accident, the traffic light was on free track, there were no speed limit signs, no beacons or ERTMS, the emergency system that does exist on the rest of the track and that stops the train if the driver it doesn’t. The only guide the drivers had was the so-called maximum speed table, the reference manual that Renfe workers carry on board in the cabin. Faced with a total absence of signs that would anticipate the Angrois curve that awaited the exit of a tunnel and help a staggered reduction, according to the driver’s monitors, each one took their own references in the landscape; Some even pointed out as the moment in which he began to slow down “a chalet with a swimming pool”.
However, ADIF’s high-ranking lawyer has insisted today that “the accident is self-explained by the driver’s conduct” and his “abnormal” driving and has stressed that the risk was “unpredictable”. The train was traveling 199 kilometers away, on an afternoon with drizzle and fog and in a section that the train drivers have described as “monotonous” and characterized by the “succession of tunnels and viaducts”, already in the outskirts of Santiago, when Francisco José Garzón Amo received the call from the controller on the corporate phone. It was a call that, as all the train drivers who have testified have agreed in the trial, he had to attend because it could be an emergency.
What affects the most is what happens closer. To not miss anything, subscribe.
subscribe
But this communication established in the first place by the controller, Antonio Martín Marugán, as he has acknowledged because at that time “he had nothing to do” and he was “relaxed”, it lasted 100 seconds. The inspector wanted to know what conditions were in the Pontedeume station (far beyond Santiago) to guarantee the comfortable descent of a family with children and suitcases. Entangled in this telephone conversation, the train driver, as stated in the trial, lost the “situational” reference and was not aware that he was on the curve in which he had to travel at 80 kilometers per hour until he left the tunnel. He braked, but there was no time left: the derailment occurred at 179.38 kilometers per hour. 80 people died and 145 were injured. Days after the accident, signs and beacons were installed and the concept of “significant speed change” was defined from the department that Cortabitarte was no longer running at that time.
The driver’s lawyer clings to this lack of signs prior to the accident to explain that Garzón did not break the speed limits, since they were not listed. “The danger of the curve was a clamor” among the professionals, recalled Manuel Prieto in his speech this Thursday, which lasted almost three hours (with a couple of breaks to rest his throat) and in which he took the opportunity to launch several darts at the prosecutor, who withdrew at the last minute and by surprise his accusation against Cortabitarte. “Adif does not evaluate, does not mitigate, does not control” the “intolerable risk”, the lawyer has emphatically said, who has also come out in defense of the 100-second call that disoriented the driver from the place where he was: “A conversation takes time what” two people “take to understand each other”, has defended about the length of the call, the driver’s lawyer.
Prieto alleges that his defendant “is not responsible for ADIF’s negligence”; of the danger “created” by ADIF. On the contrary, the lawyer also considers him “a victim” and compares him to the driver who died in the Valencia metro accident in 2006, a catastrophe in which four managers were held responsible. A disaster of which, precisely, the now accused Cortabitarte was a judicial expert. “What would happen if we left everything the same as it was in June 2013? that there would be another accident ”, Garzón’s lawyer asked himself and answered himself in his final report, referring to the safety measures that were implemented almost immediately after the derailment.
Prieto has contrasted ADIF’s attitude with the “coherent and real line from the beginning” by the Renfe worker, who spoke “freely from the moment the accident occurred.” “Another issue is that they have twisted” his words by whom this lawyer understands “responsible for the incident, to create the appearance of infringement.” But “Mr. Garzón did not commit imprudence and even less serious imprudence”, his lawyer has repeated, but that in the A Grandeira curve, in the Angrois neighborhood, at the entrance to Santiago, “there was a risk of foreseeable and unacceptable”.
The victims: “There is greater responsibility in Cortabitarte”
For the defense of Francisco Garzón, the “lack of analysis and mitigation” of the risks, “the lack” of signaling on the curve” and “of protection of the train”, as well as the “deficient table of maximum speeds” and the ” deficient training” of the driver led to the derailment. A chief and monitor of the train drivers warned his Renfe superiors in writing of this danger, and his analysis, according to the victims and the train driver’s lawyer, was also known by some person in charge of ADIF, but no decision was made other than ” reinforce the training” of the pilots, who had to look for their own references “in the landscape” to know that they were approaching the most critical point of the itinerary.
The latest statement from the victims points to the Administration for “contaminating public opinion” and “misleadingly advertising that the line and the train had the security system that would have prevented the tragedy.” “It is difficult to apologize for something for which one does not feel responsible,” said the head of the Galician State Attorney’s Office, Javier Suárez, the day his final report was presented to justify the Administration’s “lack of empathy” with the authorities. victims of the disaster and the fact that public representatives have not apologized as Garzón Amo did on successive occasions.
“Without ignoring the driver’s mistake, which occurs in a matter of seconds,” concludes the note from the victims, “there is greater responsibility in Cortabitarte who, as the prosecutor said before his unexpected turn, did not fulfill his duty within ADIF to ‘ensure the line was secure’ and disconnected [autorizó desconectar] speed control system [ERTMS] ‘without first carrying out a risk assessment’.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
#Angrois #Alvia #case #sentencing #tears #driver #cries #sold #state #lawyers #Galicia