By Ioanna Mandrou

Six years after the murder fire in the Eye which determined the collective memory, with a hundred dead and dozens of burns, the justice reached the point of issuing a preliminary ruling decisionrecording one of the grayest pages in justice delays.

The Court after 19 months of hearings, where it tried to cover the time wasted in the interrogation, today Holy Monday issues its decision on the guilt or not of the 21 peoplewho sat at bench as responsible for the unprecedented disaster.

The defendantsmainly executives, at that time, of the state apparatus, Fire Brigade, Civil Protection and self-administrative agents were faced with homicides and injuries serially through negligence, as many as were the dead and the burned.

In addition to these, in the trial for the tragedy in Mati, the elderly man who started the deadly fire in Dau Pentelis was also tried, as a result of which it spread due to the strong winds and burned the area due to a series of mishandling and criminal omissions by the state agencies and those in charge at the time .

The decision that will be issued today does not, unfortunately, remove the risk of the statute of limitations for this tragic case, which took six years to reach a judicial decision, as the charges are misdemeanors and the statute of limitations, if the trial in the second degree does not begin within 2024 is extremely likely. If this happens, it will be a disgrace to justice and the rule of law in our country.

In any case, in the trial for the Eye, which lasted so many months, the relatives of the victims, the burn victims and others who lived through the unprecedented disaster described scenes of hell and suffering, such that even in cinematographic works it is not easy to find.

The criminal omissions of the state services, the Fire Brigade and Civil Protection mainly, however, as proved in the hearing process, but also of the self-government determined the magnitude of the disaster.