He affirms that he learned about the conversation when reviewing the telephone record and he is not aware that Garzón complained about his time in the dungeon
SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Oct. 25 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The national police officer who served as secretary of the investigation of the Alvia accident that occurred at the Angrois curve on July 24, 2013 has stated this Tuesday that, in the first statements taken in the days after the incident, the Renfe controller denied until “Twice” the call with the driver, Francisco Garzón, moments before the derailment.
In fact, to questions from the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the lawyers for the parties during the fourth day of the trial, he replied that said call “was not known to him” by any of the statements made, but that he became aware of it on July 31 , one week after the events, through the telephone record.
The instructor’s secretary –the instructor himself, who was also called to testify at the trial, has already died– explained that it was the record that confirmed that, from 8:39 p.m. on July 24, 2013, Garzón kept that 100-second call with the intervener in the “moments before the accident”.
“From the first moment we tried to value some type of distraction”, the agent confirmed, when answering the questions of the prosecutor Mario Piñeiro, to defend the actions carried out.
The “distraction” that the call entailed “was determined after five days”, since neither the driver who had taken the train to Ourense, nor the security guard nor the Renfe controller himself had said so. “They told us that they had no contact with the train driver,” he confirmed. And what’s more, the inspector had assured them that he had only spoken with Garzón on the phone when he was in Ourense.
Thus, the police secretary of the investigation has insisted that “until the 31st”, when they obtained “the information” from one of the three mobile phones he was carrying, they did not know that call.
Another of the keys to the investigation was the security conditions of the road, a fact that could determine the responsibility of the other accused in this macro-trial: the former security director of Adif, Andrés Cortabitarte.
In this context, apart from the recordings made of the route and the curve of A Grandeira, information was received on the traffic conditions in the section, but only as “a comment”, for which the Police asked both the Infrastructure Administrator and Renfe to be formally accredited.
“The communication they give us is that the train driver must know, through his authorization, the speed chart”, he stated. Along these lines, as to whether there were any beacons that jumped when the maximum allowed was exceeded, the two public companies reported that the established security system was Asfa and that there was also the one known as the “dead man’s pedal”, which drivers must press continuously, and if they don’t, the train stops.
Some lawyers for victims have also asked the secretary of the investigation about why some Facebook screenshots were included in the file with a photo published by the driver -on dates prior to the Angrois accident- on a speedometer of a train at 200 kilometers per hour.
“We do not value the relevance initially,” the police officer justified. “We provide all the circumstances that can influence the driving of that train. Any detail, however insignificant, was provided because a series of comments appeared about the speed, so that it could be assessed by the judicial body,” he added.
The complaints expressed by the train driver himself during his statement during the trial as a defendant, on October 6, have also come out during the interrogation.
According to Francisco Garzón, when he was taken from the Santiago Hospital to the prison cell as a detainee, he still had “three broken ribs” and could not lie down during the night, for which he requested a chair that –according to his version– he was denied.
However, when asked by the train driver’s defense lawyer, the police secretary of the investigation has rejected that he be forced to leave the health center –“We only transfer him when he is discharged from hospital,” he has alleged– and that Garzón stated that night any complaint, because “it would have been recorded that way” in the file.
Likewise, “a protocol was activated to prevent self-harm”, because the detainee “obviously was not in his best circumstances”.
The judge has intervened to cut the course of the interrogation, because the treatment of the train driver in his time in the dungeon “is not the object” of the trial.
“If you have any problem about the treatment that was given to your client as a detainee or as investigated in court, you should have revealed it at the time. Now it is no longer a matter of anything,” Fernández settled bluntly. Curras.
