The Galician Prosecutor’s Office confirmed this Monday that it will appeal the sentence for the Angrois railway accident, in which the driver and the former director of Traffic Safety of the ADIF were sentenced to two and a half years in prison for 80 homicides committed due to professional negligence. serious. According to Cadena SER, the Public Ministry will request the exoneration of the former security director of Adif, Andrés Kortabitarte, sentenced to two and a half years in prison, as well as the train driver, Francisco José Garzón.
After several weeks studying the text and the possibility, sources from the Prosecutor’s Office confirmed this Monday that they will present the appeal next week, which is the deadline given by the judge for this step.
The same sources have indicated that “the details of the appeal, challenging part of the judicial resolution, in accordance with the criteria maintained by the Santiago Area Prosecutor’s Office, will be given as soon as it is presented in court, which will occur in a few days. ”.
Everything seems to indicate that in its appeal, the Public Ministry will demand the exoneration of the man who was security director of Adif when the incident occurred, in accordance with the criteria maintained by the prosecutor in the trial, since he withdrew the accusation against him in the final conclusions, blaming only the accident on the driver.
The sentence, of more than 500 pages, was issued at the end of July, just after 11 years of the tragedy. Initially, the judge gave a period of 10 business days to appeal, which ended on September 10. However, the volume of clarifications requested and the complexity of the case forced this deadline to be extended, which ends next week.
Fernández Currás considered proven in the ruling that both defendants, the train driver and the former head of Adif security, are responsible for 79 crimes of homicide and 143 of injuries due to serious recklessness.
The president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, has avoided taking a position on the Prosecutor’s Office’s decision, but has considered it “consistent with his position”, given that he had already withdrawn the accusation against the former ADIF security chief.
Conclusions of the Prosecutor’s Office
Although the arguments that the Prosecutor’s Office will present in its appeal have not yet been made public, we do know the arguments that Mario Piñeiro – then the prosecutor of the case that his partner Antonio Roma now has in his hands – expressed in his final conclusions to withdraw the accusation of the person responsible for Adif security.
Specifically, Piñeiro considered at the end of the trial that, “in his capacity as security director, he did not violate the duty he owed” 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”.
In this way, according to the final report of the Prosecutor’s Office, the Ourense-Santiago high-speed line, in which an Alvia train derailed in a section without the ‘ERTMS’ safety system due to a project change, “was designed in accordance with “technical standards” and in accordance with Adif’s “practical codes.”
The prosecutor also considered that “a risk analysis was carried out that requires a dossier that analyzed the security” of the line and that “the risks were considered tolerable.”
In fact, he assumed arguments from the State Attorney’s Office by highlighting that “on other lines the ‘Asfa’ system travels at 200 km/h (…) and the source of risk, the significant change in speed, was not identified as risk factor prior to this accident and subsequently another 400 points were identified along the entire line of the general network.”
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