Close to Easter, the date of the elections will be announced, government spokesman Yannis Oikonomou said on Monday in the main Mega news bulletin.

Referring to the tragedy of Tempe, the government representative accused SYRIZA and Alexis Tsipras of setting up propaganda about human suffering.

For the elections

“The Prime Minister will clarify his intentions very soon. We had said that the elections would be held in the Spring and I don’t think this planning will deviate from that timetable. Very soon we will have more specific news in this direction. The important thing is not the dates, but to highlight the dilemmas, the stakes, the direction the country must follow and all that before, but also now – after the tragedy of Tempe – are highlighted even more imperatively. There will be announcements close to Easter,” said Mr. Economou.

For the tragic accident of Tempe

“The effort of the Opposition and Mr. Tsipras personally – this is not the first time – to turn pain into a spectacle is unfolding before our eyes. From the first moment we said that the project of remote control is not finished. This is something we all agree on. We disagree on what the course of the project was, but all this with the documents coming to light will unravel, there will be no doubt. Delivery – receipt protocols are the best witnesses of what worked and what didn’t. We never said that remote control works along the entire length of the railway. This is something that is in the toolbox of Mr. Tsipras to make the opposition as he thinks it should be on this tragedy,” emphasized Mr. Economou.

He added “what we said – and it cannot be disputed – is that at the Larissa Station Office there is a local remote control system in which automatic marking can be done, you can automatically mark the line on the board, monitor the train’s course, be able to to see if a train is moving in the opposite direction on the same track. The station master could have done part of the remote control on this board, automatically chart the train’s path so that it doesn’t go on the wrong track, track it for 5.5 kilometers and that way the collision could have been avoided. This had happened up to an hour before the accident, it had happened three or four times in the previous shift. This is confirmed from all sides.”

Referring to the visit of Alexis Tsipras to the old remote control center of Larissa, the government representative noted:
“Mr. Tsipras, instead of being accompanied today by a man who has been absent for some 12 years due to a pension from OSE and I think he is from Xanthi, could be accompanied by a local station master in Larissa. She could take him by the hand and go to the station house and see it. After he went to the trouble and on the day that the Institutions and Transparency Committee met in the Parliament for everyone to testify the truth he took the cameras to make this show, while he could have gone two steps further. It is one thing to bring out the reality and the truth and everyone tries to document it, it is another thing to make a vulgar propaganda about human suffering with lies, to use a decorum to support completely different things than what the scenery, which you have set behind you”.