The government is in a frenzy after information emerged about the falsification of an audio recording of conversations between the driver and the station manager in Tempi

The government is under great pressure from both the opposition and the public after the publication of information about the forgery of audio recordings of conversations between the station master and the drivers during the Tempi train disaster (the Vima revelations).

Government officials are trying to convince the country's population that this did not affect the quality of the judicial investigation into the Tempi crime, which is inherently false, while there are serious doubts as to whether there was any such thing in the available visual material. The drivers themselves complained about the installation of audio recordings, which were distributed daily, and the workers’ union itself contacted the Athens prosecutor’s office O.S.E.to find out how the audio recordings got into the media at the time.

In fact, information about the forgery of the audio recording has been known for a long time, and the To Vima publication only made the accusations publicly available.

In its statement, the union emphasized that “all audio messages in OSE are recorded and can be retrieved”but the OSE employees responsible for this “numerically few”adding that “Responsibility for securing audio recordings lies solely with the General Manager, unless the authorization and writing system assigns responsibility to more than one person.”

Judging not only by what has been recorded and exposed in recent months (loss of camera footage that might have shown what the freight train was carrying and what caused the explosion, evidence disappearing with the explosion), but also on the general political life of the government, there is a serious lack of trust in the current government.

Let us recall that the edited audio recording was published at 22.11 on the evening of March 1, 2023, the day after the tragic incident, by the Proto Thema website. In it, the deceased driver of the Intercity 62 train, S. Koutsoumbas, receives instructions from the now imprisoned Larisa station master, Vasilis Samaras, and shortly thereafter asks him questions: “Vasilis, am I leaving?” only to receive the answer: “You're leaving, you're leaving.”

As Vima found out, this is audio was stitched from two digital files, in which the station manager was talking to two different drivers, but it was cleverly hidden. In particular, the first few seconds of the second file, in which the station master addresses the driver of another local train, calling him Sotiri, were cut.

The question that remains unanswered is who managed to do this and when, given that only a few hours have passed since the accident and data collection. According to the official report of experts appointed by the Larissa Traffic Police, engineers Ap. Vasilakos and St. Batzopoulos report that the data was downloaded on March 1, 2023 between 17.00 and 19.00:

“We went to the OSE station in Larissa, where, in the presence of employees of the Larissa Road Department, representatives of OSE, Hellenic Train, ΕΡΓΟΣΕ and ALSTOM were extracted data from the incident registration system based on movements made specifically on the local control and visual control panel of the Larissa SS, between Tuesday 28 February 2023 21:50:36 and Wednesday 1 March 2023 02:39:45 am“.

In practice this means that hundreds of digital recordings of radiotelephone conversations were uploaded there (VHF radio), telephones and GSMR, as well as recording of path change key manipulations. This also means that a well-organized government mechanism was mobilized and managed to find two previously unused files to file a story of “single human error” and either edit them or send them with clear instructions on how to connect them. And all this within three hours, so that all the media have time to reproduce it. No one could handle this except…

There is, of course, a version that there was not just one “data dump”, the one in Larisa, but much more: for example, the then OSE traffic director K. Chrysagis, who died on 03.27.23 in a strange accident, in the only statement that he managed to give, described the procedure differently. The deceased spoke with investigators of the “Herapetrit Committee” on March 14: “Two files were seized from the voice recorders in Larisa, which were requested by the prosecutor in Larisa, and they went and made this seizure in the presence of Mr. Teresakis.” As a reminder, Mr. Teresakis is currently serving as interim CEO of OSE.

However, on the day of the accident, 28/2/23, Mr. Teresakis was a management consultant through a private company, from which he resigned on 1 March and officially took up his position on 17/3. The late Chrysagis also testified that during the installation “a recording was made and two files were taken, which Mr. Teresakis gave, regarding the recorder, that is, the table on which the movements of the local operator were recorded, as well as conversations on the radio and telephone of the station.”

He further emphasized: “We tried to transcribe, transcribe and write down, there were difficulties in some of the conversations and determining who was speaking where, because it was a radiotelephone that we all heard. It was the best attempt we've had in the time we've had, but there are other things that aren't immediately apparent or we can't say for sure who said them.”

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