ATHENS-More than 50,000 protesters took to streets across Greece on Wednesday and workers staged mass strikes, expressing anger over the country’s worst rail tragedy and urging the prime minister to resign.
At least 57 people were killed, and 14 others remain in hospital after a freight train crashed head-on with a passenger train, carrying mostly students, on February 28.
Demonstrators in Athens waved signs reading “it’s not an accident, it’s a crime” and “it could have been any of us on that train”.
By early afternoon, police said up to 53,000 demonstrators had taken to the streets across the country to protest the accident.
“I am here to pay tribute to the dead but also to express my anger and my frustration,” Athens protester Niki Siouta, a 54-year-old civil engineer, told AFP. “This government must go.”
There were about 30,000 protesters in Athens, 15,000 in Greece’s second city Thessaloniki and 10,000 in the western port city of Patras, a police spokeswoman told AFP.
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Fourteen people were detained for questioning in the capital on suspicion of offences including carrying flares, she added.
Alongside the protesters, Greek civil servants staged a 24-hour walkout while doctors, teachers, bus drivers and ferry crew members also went on strike.
Railways were paralysed as train workers extended strike action launched in the aftermath of the accident.
Last week protests triggered by the crash saw riot police clash repeatedly with demonstrators, including in Athens. The public order ministry has said talks were held with protest organisers to avert new violence.
Calls are growing louder for Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to quit over the tragedy, which has shone a harsh spotlight on decades of government mismanagement of the rail network.