Alvia victims “satisfied” with Cortabitarte’s conviction: “The official truth is being disproved”

The victims of the Alvia 04155 accident, which occurred on 24 July 2013 in Santiago de Compostela, Spain and left 80 dead and 144 injured, have expressed their “satisfaction” with the sentence which, in addition to the driver, condemns the former director of Traffic Safety at Adif, Andrés Cortabitarte. “The official truth, which they wanted to sell us, is being disproved: that the driver was the only person responsible. There was a lot of negligence on the part of Adif, who were the ones who signed the change in the project that reduced safety and the disconnection of a safety system that would have avoided the accident because it caused delays,” Jesús Domínguez, president of the 04155 victims’ platform, told Europa Press. After 11 years of fighting in which Europe “proved them right”, he thanked Judge María Elena Fernández Currás for being “independent and brave” when passing sentence. All this, when this Friday the resolution of the Criminal Court number 2 of Santiago de Compostela was known, which has sentenced Francisco Garzón, the train driver, and Andrés Cortabitarte, to two years and six months in prison for 79 crimes of homicide and 143 crimes of injuries due to serious negligence. In this sense, Jesús Domínguez has stressed that the victims “always said” that there was more responsibility on the part of Adif, even in Renfe, and has recalled that ten senior officials received a written warning from a chief driver in which he warned of the danger and “they were not sitting in the dock”. They argue that there was “more responsibility on their part than on the driver” since Garzón “had a lapse”. “It is a matter of seconds, there are people in his office who receive an alert and do absolutely nothing”, he criticised. “In this case Cortabitarte had two opportunities”, he continued. The first of them, when the project was changed, “safety was reduced” and the experts should have done a risk analysis “and it was not done, Renfe even told him to put beacons.” Life “gave him a second chance” and when he was asked to disconnect the Ertms (European Rail Traffic Management System) security system – which alerted the driver where he had to brake or else the train would not stop automatically – “in his own handwriting, he signed the disconnection.” “For us, those two actions are more punishable than the driver’s mistake,” he said. “THE STATE ATTORNEYS’ OFFICE SHOULD ASK FOR FORGIVENESS” Faced with a possible appeal by Cortabitarte’s defense, Jesús Domínguez has been blunt and has considered that the State’s attorneys should now “apologize for all those lies they told for years” and not appeal so as “not to cause even more pain to the victims.” “We expect little from the Spanish institutions, we have had to go abroad to seek justice, truth and we will have to do it again, perhaps, in the future,” he stressed. “INSTEAD OF GOING TO THE SUPREME COURT, LET HIM GO HOME” The victims have also attacked the prosecutor Mario Piñeiro, who withdrew the accusation against Adif, and have recommended that, “if he has any humanity and shame left”, instead of going to the Supreme Court “he should go home.” All this, after the victims of the accident criticized the fact that the Attorney General of the State, Álvaro García Ortiz, “rewarded” the prosecutor of the Alvia case, Mario Piñeiro, with a position in the Supreme Court for having withdrawn the accusation against Adif during the trial, despite having previously asked for four years for Andrés Cortabitarte.

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Source: Newsroom Infobae from Infobae.com on 2024-07-27 00:05:40