A call with Garzón denied up to “twice”: key prior to the Renfe controller’s statement scheduled for this Wednesday
SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Oct. 25 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Francisco José Garzón, the driver of the Alvia 04155 involved in an accident at the Angrois bend in Compostela on July 23, 2014, pointed to his own responsibility and to a “mistake” in the first moments after the derailment, but without failing to denounce that a lack of security on that section “left everything in the hands of the driver”.
This has been verified by the first agents of the National Police who arrived at the scene of the incident that day and who this Tuesday have testified as witnesses on the fourth day of the trial that is being held in the Cidade da Cultura, in Santiago, for more than nine years after the accident that left 80 dead and 145 injured.
After ten days since the last session, and with the absence of both accused –in addition to Garzón, Adif’s former director of security, Andrés Cortabitarte– because Judge Elena Fernández Currás allowed it, access to the judicial building has been freed from the presence of the media.
Up to nine police officers have intervened before the magistrate and several of them have corroborated the words spoken by the train driver, both in small conversations they had with him, and in several phone calls he made from Angrois before his transfer to the Clinical Hospital.
The commissioner of the Judicial Police of A Coruña, who at that time was in charge of the security operation for the festivities of July 25 and the day before, was the first commander to reach the curve and so he has reported when asked by the Prosecutor Mario Piñeiro and the different parties involved.
He has recounted how he was “half an hour” with the driver after he was removed from the locomotive, with a bloody face. According to the commissioner, Garzón recognized his excessive speed: “I screwed up. It was coming at 190 kilometers per hour.”
The police officer has argued that it was not an interrogation, but that he wanted to know “what had happened” because, in fact, the first calls to alert the incident “spoke of an explosion” and in the place “there was a smell of burning and ammonal, an explosive substance”.
Another policeman who was with Garzón after the accident has assured that the driver was sorry for what happened — “My God, what I have done,” he said — and blamed it on the fact that he had “lost his mind” while driving, so He thought that he was still “two tunnels before” and that he still had to go to the A Grandeira curve.
After the incident, Garzón was sitting on a bench until the toilets ordered his evacuation to the hospital. He has also testified to another agent who escorted him to the car and that he has recounted how he “talked without anyone asking him.”
“He told us that he felt guilty, that the fault had been his, that the safety of the track was not adequate for the speed that the train could carry, that everything was in the hands of the driver,” he summarized.
Garzón also answered several calls and to one of them, according to the policeman, he replied: “It was me.” During the interrogation, the driver’s defense has tried to separate that phrase from any attribution of responsibility, because it could simply be people who contacted him to ask if the derailed Alvia was his.
Another of the keys in the trial, and to which “the mistake” of the driver would be attributed, is the call of about 100 seconds that he had moments before the derailment with the Renfe controller, Antonio Martín Marugán, whose statement, among others It is scheduled for this Wednesday.
And it is that, as Francisco Garzón declared on October 6, that call, which was “on duty” and in which he was interested in some travelers who were going to Pontedeume and about how to enter said station, did not prevent him from continuing “paying attention”, although it made him “lose situational awareness”.
This Tuesday the policeman who served as secretary in the investigation of the report also declared, given that the instructor himself has already passed away. He has explained before the judge that “from the first moment” the body tried to discover “some kind of distraction” on the part of the driver.
However, as he has stated, they were not aware of the call until July 31, a week after the accident, after obtaining the data from the telephone record of one of the mobile phones that the driver was carrying.
In fact, neither the driver who took the Alvia to Ourense –which Garzón took over from him–, nor the security guard, nor the inspector himself, commented on it in their first statements. Moreover, Marugán denied that call “twice”, as the police secretary of the investigation answered on Tuesday.
The agent, during the interrogation to which he has submitted as a witness, has also denied any type of mistreatment to which the driver was subjected the night he spent in the dungeon, because “it does not appear” in the file. In addition, he has assured that he was not arrested until he was “discharged from hospital.”
Precisely, it was during the train driver’s representative’s turn that the judge intervened to cut the questions about the arrest, which seemed “relevant” to the lawyer.
“That is not the object of my judgment (…) 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 made it clear at the time. Now no longer it comes to mind of nothing”, has settled, bluntly, Fernández Currás.
The police secretary of the investigation has not stopped claiming his experience of “more or less 38 years in the Police.” “I know how to start an investigation,” he insisted, when responding to Garzón’s defense. “I wasn’t coached by anyone, if that’s what you think.”
The trial will resume this Wednesday with the statements as witnesses of the Renfe controller with whom the train driver spoke on the phone, the security employee and another worker from the operator who were on board the Alvia, as well as the driver who took the train from Medina del Campo to Ourense.
