Renfe's lawyer has requested this Thursday the "maximum leniency" for Francisco José Garzón Amo, the train driver who on July 24, 2013 drove the Alvia from Ourense that derailed at the A Grandeira curve, before entering the Santiago station.
In the presentation of the definitive conclusions, the representative of the transport operator has placed special emphasis on the fact that this driver was the "sole guarantor of the undetected weaknesses".
"Everything was in order, but it was not enough," remarked this lawyer, who recalled that Garzón Amo received a call from the on-board controller, Antonio Martín Marugán, "in the worst possible place for security purposes."
That communication to the corporate mobile, which Garzón had to attend to, this lawyer stressed, "was not an emergency" and also "was absolutely unnecessary" because the driver and defendant could not have resolved the issue that was being raised, which was to facilitate the descent of a family in Pontedeume (A Coruña), a point located more than 100 kilometers from the accident site.
What caused that 100-second conversation, Renfe's lawyer has emphatically assured, was that Garzón Amo abandoned "the mental driving point" in which he was.
And, although this lawyer has recognized that a "powerful" recognition point was eliminated, the transition from ERTMS to ASFA, he has said that, if he had not proceeded in this way after detecting failures, one hypothesis would perhaps be to hold a trial for an accident but with a theory diametrically opposed to the current one, which would be "why with all the data that was known, the disconnection did not occur".
To this observation he has added another, which is that "the system, at that unique, critical moment, did not help him".
The trial, which has been held in the City of Culture since October 5, 2022, will foreseeably end next week, three days after the tenth anniversary of the railway tragedy, with interventions next Wednesday by the insurers of Adif and Renfe and on Thursday by the defense of the two defendants, Garzón Amo and the former head of security in the Adif Circulation Andrés Cortabitarte.
Later, the president magistrate Elena Fernández Currás will have to issue a sentence that is expected for the last stretch of the year.
