Thirty-month prison sentences for train driver and Adif official following deadly high-speed derailment in Spain

The train that left the track at the Angrois curve Santiago de Compostela on 24 July 2013 left 79 people dead and 143 injured

Ander Azpiroz

Madrid

Friday, 26 July 2024, 15:13

Eleven years after the event, the court sentence on the Alvia high-speed train derailment on 24 July 2013 that left 79 people dead and 143 injured has been delivered.

The Santiago de Compostela derailment happened when a train travelling from Madrid to Ferrol, in the north-west of Spain, derailed on a bend about 4 kilometres outside the railway station at Santiago de Compostela. The train's data recorder showed that it was travelling at over twice the posted speed limit of 80 kilometres per hour (50 mph) when it entered a curve on the track. The crash was recorded on a track-side camera that showed all 13 carriages derailing and four overturning.

The Criminal Court number 2 of Santiago de Compostela has sentenced Francisco Garzón, the train driver, to two years and six months in prison, and Andrés Cortabitarte, who was then the director of Traffic Safety at Adif (Spain's rail infrastructure operator), to the same sentence. In addition, the defendants were disqualified from exercising their professions for four and a half years and were ordered to pay compensation of 25 million euros to the victims' families, which in the event of impossibility of payment must be paid by Adif's insurers. The Public Prosecutor's Office had asked the defendants to serve four years in prison.

Regarding the train driver, the court considered it proved that Garzón responded to a call to his mobile phone that "lacked urgency" from the train's controller so that a woman who was getting off at Pontedeume station, after the Angrois curve, could find out where to alight to get down to the platform. Three members of this family died as a result of the derailment. "I ask the families of the victims to forgive me. But it was an accident, I could not avoid it," Garzón said in tears during the trial.

The court ruled in the sentence that there was "an omission of the most basic of precautions for a professional to make sure, before answering the call, of the place where he was or even to do so during the conversation". And it insisted that Garzón not only disregarded the instructions required by the work of a train driver, but also failed to notice the side signals and an acoustic alarm that warned that the Alvia train unit was going too fast.

As for the Adif official convicted, the sentence underlined that Cortabitarte certified that the line and its control, command and signalling structural subsystem met the safety conditions for its operation, which allowed the then Ministry of Public Works to authorise its commissioning. And he did so, according to the sentence, despite the fact that the preliminary risk analysis carried out by the joint venture to which the construction project for the structural subsystem was awarded identified the risk of derailment.

Both defendants, according to the judge, breached the duty of care that their positions required of them, as their actions entailed "an unlawful increase in the risk of a harmful result that they were obliged to prevent and were able to avoid; and which, due to the importance of the legally protected assets put at risk, and which were fatally injured, can only be classified as serious".

The sentence is not final and the defence teams can appeal to the Provincial Court of A Coruña.

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