The loneliness of the driver of the Alvia before the 80 corpses
Francisco José Garzón Amo, engineer who on July 24, 2013 was driving the Alvia train that crashed on the outskirts of Santiago leaving 80 dead and 144 injured, has seen how, with a stroke of the pen, he returned to the days after the accident, when all the blame pointed towards him as the only person responsible. After eight months of criminal and civil proceedings, the process began yesterday with the documentation and conclusions process and, surprisingly, the prosecutor in the case decided to withdraw the accusation against the other defendant, the former director of Traffic Safety Adif, Andrés Cortabitarte, and attribute all responsibility to the driver.
In justifying his conclusions, the prosecutor in the case, Mario Piñeiro, pointed out this Wednesday that the telephone call from the controller to the train driver is “the direct cause” of the railway accident.
According to the Prosecutor's Office, the mobile phone call was an “unfortunate” event that caused the driver to neglect his responsibilities and to be completely “abstracted”, losing control of the train, at the entrance of a curve in which he did not slow down.
“That day he made more than careless use of the telephone,” stressed Piñeiro, who considers that this behavior implies “serious imprudence, without the slightest doubt.”
“An Inconsequential Call”
In this way, the focus is once again on an incorrect circulation speed, since the prosecutor does maintain against the driver the same accusation with which the trial began, that he was driving at 199 km/h in a section close to the dangerous curve of To Grandeira, when he answered a call to the corporate mobile, which does not have a hands-free system, made by the controller, speaking for 100 seconds. By responding, he broke “the minimum rules of attention and professionals that are required of him” and, when he finally reacted, he managed to reduce the speed to 179.38 km/h, but it was insufficient to prevent the train from derailing.. According to the prosecutor, “he omitted the slightest attention from his professional duties by remaining attentive to the content of an inconsequential call for the management of the train and the services provided to travelers and dangerously extensive.”
This harsh setback came to Garzón Amo in the first session in which he was present after his statement on October 6 and surrounded by dozens of fellow train drivers, who gathered at the gates of the City of Culture of Galicia to give him their support in a process in which “we believe that in the end he is one more victim” and “he needs to be covered”. In the words of the spokesman for the machinists union (Semaf), Diego Martín, “they feel identified” with him and “we are not going to stop accompanying him in this final stage.”
The former Director of Traffic Safety at Adif, Andrés Cortabitarte. EFE
The victims, who bring the accusation both individually and through two associations, do maintain the accusation against Cortabitarte, but, without the weight of the Prosecutor's Office, the driver finds himself in a more complicated situation than when the responsibilities were shared.
Both are being tried for 80 crimes of homicide and 145 of injuries due to serious professional negligence and one of damages for which the parties request four years in prison and disqualification for both while their defenses request their free acquittal and the prosecutor and the attorney for the The State only asks for the conviction of the driver. Faced with the prosecutor's decision to focus on Garzón Amo, the victims' platform believes that Cortabitarte has more responsibility and increases the disqualification requested from four to six years.
The prosecutor, Mario Piñeiro, thus adopts the thesis already supported by the State Attorney's Office, which only accuses the driver. In his new conclusions, he sees that Cortabitarte “in his capacity as security director did not infringe the duty he held” and acted “in accordance with the procedures included in the management system” of Adif, approved by the national authority and with a methodology ” based on European regulations.
The prosecutor's decision “unworthy” of the victims. Its president, Jesús Domínguez, maintains that “there has been nothing in the oral trial to justify it, quite the contrary”, since all the independent experts and Christopher Carr, former head of security for the European Railway Agency, “made it clear that It was necessary to carry out a risk analysis and that, if it had been done, this danger would have been avoided». He understands that the “only explanation” for this change in position is “political” and attributes it to the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, without forgetting former minister José Blanco, whom they accuse of inaugurating the Ourense-Santiago line “in a hurry ».