The National Aviation and Railway Accidents and Transportation Safety Investigation Agency (HARSIA) board on Monday would remove any reference to the fireball from its report on the Tempi rail crash, said HARSIA president Christos Papadimitriou to the media earlier the same day.

He was commenting on the decision by the universities of Ghent and Pisa to distance themselves from the report's conclusions regarding the fireball that erupted after the collision of a passenger train and freight train in Tempi, on February 29, 2023.

In interviews with SKAI radio and public broadcaster ERT, Papadimitriou said that the Agency's board is expected to erase every reference to the fireball from its report.

Board decides deletion

The official announcement of the board came later on Monday, having decided for "the immediate correction of the report by deleting the chapter with the hypothesis of the cause of the fireball." 

Ghent University has expressed objections to the way the data was presented in the report, noting that their sole duty was to provide a scientific opinion on the simulations being investigated by the Independent Family Expert Investigation Committee, while they had not conducted their own simulations. The University of Pisa, meanwhile, asked for the removal of parts of the published findings, revealing that there was no agreement between the university and the committee.

Specifically, speaking to ERT, Papadimitriou stated that in order to preserve the integrity and credibility of HARSIA, there will be a request for the deletion of the small section concerning the fireball from the 178-page report.

Speaking on SKAI radio, he explained that he had explicitly requested, on February 26, that the findings not be made public before the corresponding study was released by the University of Lausanne, which is considered the best in the world in this field. However, he noted that Bart Accou, a member of the HARSIA Investigation Committee and number two in the European Union Agency for Railways, stated that if the report was not published, he would hold a press conference himself accusing the Greek agency of not allowing the European counterpart do its job. 

"Imagine what would have happened in Greece if something like that had happened," he commented. "Despite the unanimous objections, they insisted on including the fireball in the conclusions," Papadimitriou stated. In fact, he made it known that Accou had based the part on the fireball on informal conversations with experts from the University of Ghent, which forced the university to state that it disagreed with the conclusion. However, he stressed, the report was "a sound scientific work that contains 17 safety recommendations and only one peculiar and scientifically hard-to-resolve point, that of the fireball, which is left open."

Papadimitriou explained that HARSIA had no right to make even the slightest amendments to the conclusion but would seek the expert opinions of higher institutions regarding the fireball, while it had already submitted such a request to the National Centre for Scientific Research "Demokritos".

Finally, answering questions during his interview with ERT, Papadimitriou revealed that "I have received threats to not continue the investigation from foreign actors (...) I do not succumb to threats. I am not afraid of anything."

See also:

Supreme Court prosecutor orders investigation into accident investigation agency's report on Tempi

Parliamentary preliminary investigation into Triantopoulos ends with ND proposal for an indictment

(Story updated with board decision)