Prosecutor didn't do his homework
Former Adif track safety boss says 2013 high-speed train crash in Galicia was all the train driver's fault.
I managed to catch the first part of the testimony from the former safety boss for Spanish rail operator Adif, Andrés Cortabitarte, yesterday at the train crash trial in Galicia. He was answering the prosecutor’s questions with polite arrogance and making it clear that from his perspective, it was all the train driver’s fault. He announce several times that he wished to “enlighten” the court and even the expert witnesses, and the prosecutor and the judge seemed to be okay with that: “you are the technical expert”, she said with a bit of a laugh. Not one of two defendants. “We don’t have any responsibility for construction”, he said: “the cause of the accident is the train driver not doing his job”. “No one could foresee” that the train would reach that curve at that speed, some 6,000 trains in Spain would have to be stopped right away if a decision was made that the ASFA signalling system was no longer secure and there are 1,800 curves like that “or worse” across the country. “If it had been four seconds different, we would not be here right now”, he stated. The prosecutor’s office had nine years to prepare the questions and sort out cause-and-effect for it all to be able to ask about the discrepancies and the sequence of actions carried out by the defendant. The sensation yesterday was that they had not done their homework, which is a shame for the victims and for further clarifying the truth about that complex systemic accident.