The requests focus on the mobile phones of the accused stationmaster and Nikolaos Nalbantis, the deceased assistant driver of the passenger train, while the court has also been asked to summon Adonis Georgiadis and Dimitris Markopoulos as witnesses.

Thirteen witnesses are expected to testify today before the court.

At the same time, three requests remain pending concerning information about what happened before and after the passenger train departed Larissa railway station.

Two of the requests concern forensic examinations of the mobile phones of the accused night-shift stationmaster and Nalbantis.

Nalbantis’s family has requested the examination of his work phone, which police handed to his fiancée after the crash.

The aim is to determine whether the assistant train driver attempted to contact the stationmaster or anyone else after the passenger train departed Larissa railway station on the evening of 28 February.

Lawyers supporting the prosecution have submitted a corresponding request concerning the stationmaster’s mobile phone, which was seized after the crash. The examination would seek to establish whether he attempted to contact the passenger train’s driver, Georgios Koutsoubas.

The prosecutor has already recommended that the request concerning the stationmaster’s phone be accepted, proposing that communications secrecy be lifted and a forensic examination of the device conducted.

Specifically, the examination would cover incoming and outgoing calls, SMS and MMS messages, as well as communications through data-based applications such as Viber. If deleted files are detected, attempts will be made to recover them.

Lawyers supporting the prosecution, as well as the stationmaster’s defence lawyer, Stefanos Pantzartzidis, concurred with the prosecutor’s proposal.

The president of the court indicated last week that an effort would be made to issue a decision on the request during today’s hearing. The prosecutor is expected to submit a recommendation on the two new requests beforehand.

Request to summon Georgiadis and Markopoulos

The third request concerns the summoning of Adonis Georgiadis and Dimitris Markopoulos as witnesses.

As Othonas Papadopoulos, the lawyer representing the Nalbantis family, told the court, the request to summon Georgiadis is linked to a public statement he made a few days after the crash. Georgiadis said that if the then transport minister, Costas Ach. Karamanlis, had said there was a problem with railway safety, no one would have boarded the trains.

According to the family, the request to summon Markopoulos is linked to his role as chairman of the parliamentary investigative committee into the train crash.

36 defendants on trial

A total of 36 former and current officials and executives from Greek railway organisations and public bodies are defendants in the trial, including figures associated with OSE, ERGOSE, Hellenic Train, the Regulatory Authority for Railways (RAS) and the Ministry of Transport.

Thirty-three of the 36 defendants are charged with dangerous interference with fixed-track transport with conditional intent, through acts deemed dangerous to transport safety and capable of creating a common danger to property and a risk to human life.

According to the indictment, the alleged acts resulted in the deaths of a large number of people, serious bodily injury to several others and substantial damage to public utility infrastructure. The offence is alleged to have been committed repeatedly and jointly.

The felony charge carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

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