The Galician public prosecutor’s office confirmed on Monday that it would appeal the conviction for the Angrois train accident, in which the driver and the former ADIF road safety director were sentenced to two and a half years in prison. prison for 80 homicides committed due to professional misconduct. neglect. According to Cadena SER, the public prosecutor 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 of study of the text and the possibility, sources from the prosecution confirmed this Monday that they would present the appeal next week, the deadline set by the judge for this approach.
The same sources indicated that “the details of the appeal, contesting part of the judicial decision, in accordance with the criteria retained by the public prosecutor of the Santiago region, will be given as soon as it is presented to the court, which will take place within a reasonable time. a few days.”
Everything seems to indicate that in its appeal, the public prosecutor will demand the exoneration of the man who was Adif’s security director at the time of the incident, in accordance with the criteria used by the prosecutor during the trial, since he withdrew the charge against him. in the final conclusions, attributing the accident solely to the driver.
The sentence, more than 500 pages long, was handed down at the end of July, just after 11 years of drama. Initially, the judge granted 10 working days to appeal, which ended on September 10. However, the volume of clarifications requested and the complexity of the file have forced this deadline to be extended, which expires next week.
Fernández Currás considered it proven in the judgment that the two defendants, the train driver and the former head of security of Adif, are responsible for 79 crimes of homicide and 143 of injuries due to serious recklessness.
The president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, avoided taking a position on the decision of the prosecutor’s office, but considered it “in accordance with his position”, given that he had already withdrawn the accusation against the former head of ADIF security.
Conclusions of the prosecution
Although the arguments that the prosecution will present in its appeal have not yet been made public, we know the arguments that Mario Piñeiro – then prosecutor of the case that his partner Antonio Roma now has in his hands – expressed in his final conclusions. to withdraw the accusation from the head of Adif security.
More precisely, Piñeiro considered at the end of the trial that, “in his capacity as director of security, he did not violate the duty incumbent on him” and acted “in accordance with the procedures included in the management system” of the Adif, approved by the national government. competent and with a methodology “based on European regulations”.
Thus, according to the final report of the public prosecutor’s office, the Orense-Santiago high-speed line, on which an Alvia train derailed in a section without an ‘ERTMS’ safety system due to a change of project, “was designed in accordance with the “technical standards” and in accordance with the “practical codes” of Adif.
The prosecutor also estimated that “a risk analysis was carried out which requires a file analyzing the security” of the line and that “the risks were considered tolerable”.
He in fact took up the arguments of the public prosecutor by emphasizing that “on other lines, the ‘Asfa’ system circulates at 200 km/h (…) and that the source of the risk, the significant change in speed, was not identified as a risk factor before this accident, then 400 other points were identified along the entire line of the general network.
