Tragedy victims reject overruling

Lawyers representing many of the victims of the Once train station crash and their relatives yesterday rejected statements made by Carlo Michele Ferrari, chairman of Trenes de Buenos Aires (TBA), the company responsible for the railway, who wishes to annul a large portion of the cases involved from the investigation.

Martín Clemente, Ferrari’s lawyer, requested that all formal statements connected to the case be nullified because the charges lack “precision”, “details” and “clarity,” effectively undermining the defence. However, Marcelo Parrilli and María del Carmen Verdú, the lawyers representing the victims, yesterday rejected these statements, describing them as “untimely” and “untrue.”

“The content of the formal statements clearly state the facts which each and every one of the defendants were charged with, allowing them to properly exercise its right of defence,” said the lawyers.

They added that “we should not forget that in order to invalidate a procedural record, it is essential to verify a real and concrete prejudice with an effective limitation of the defendant’s right.”

Federal Judge Claudio Bonadío, in charge of the investigation, must resolve between today and next Monday the legal situation of more than 30 defendants, who had already made their formal statement.

Marco Antonio Córdoba, the train’s driver, was subjected to further medical tests on Wednesday to establish if he suffers from epilepsy. When he was interviewed by Bonadío he denied having that illness. The test results have yet to be announced.

The February 22 accident saw Córdoba’s train crash into platform 2 of Once train station on February 22, killing 51 people and injuring over 700.

Other defendants in the case are former transport secretaries Ricardo Jaime and Juan Pablo Schiavi, who resigned days after the tragedy in February, and Claudio Cirigliano, former TBA chairman, who was arrested for hiding the company’s accounting documents and was released last Friday.

Herald with DyN