The European Union has reappeared as a counterweight to the alleged reason of State that has marked the actions of the Spanish Administration after the Angrois railway disaster, whose trial ends today, ten years after the accident in which 80 people died. With the victims on the warpath again against the Prosecutor's Office, for once again wanting to convict only the driver, the EU expert who directed the crucial report on the accident warns that if the sentence is like this, "we will go back 20 years in terms of security".
The key to everything continues to be in the conversation that the engineer José Francisco Garzón Amo had with the Atocha control center in Madrid, just after the derailment. He admitted that he entered a curve at 190 kilometers per hour, that of A Grandeira, in the Compostela neighborhood of Angrois, despite the fact that he should have done it at a maximum of 80.
That first part was leaked and made public shortly after the catastrophe, which occurred late in the afternoon of July 24, 2013. It took time for the rest to reach public opinion, in which Garzón said that he had already warned from the dangerousness of the “to the safety” curve, while stressing the risk of an oversight, like the one he had just had talking on the phone with the conductor.
The driver's responsibility, for which the Prosecutor's Office requests four years in prison, was admitted by himself from the beginning. The question was always whether there is nothing else, as the government maintained, then the PP and supported in this by the PSOE, as well as the Prosecutor's Office and the Court of A Coruña. And if the real problem resided in the lack of an automatic security mechanism to alleviate a possible human error. That is the position of the platform of victims and of the European Railway Agency, whose report forced the Court to reopen the investigation, imputing Andrés Cortabitarte to a high position of the Railway Infrastructure Administrator, Adif. In June, in the initial process, he stopped being accused by the prosecution to be accused only by the victims. Its president, Jesús Domínguez, believes that there were "orders from above" and that "reason of state" reappeared.
Just before the trial is to be seen today so that the magistrate Elena Fernández Currás will prepare the sentence, Cadena Ser broadcast some statements by Cristopher Carr, the author of the European Union report, in which he emphasizes that in the face of a risk such as that of the Angrois curve, “the driver cannot be the only line of defence”. He maintains that accidents of this type are due to "acts or omissions" that occur at various levels of the rail system.
