ATHENS: Greece’s conservative government defeated a censure motion in parliament on Thursday that was lodged over claims it had tried to manipulate a probe into the deadly train collision that rocked the country last year.
The no-confidence motion was failed, with 159 deputies of the three hundred in parliament voting against, and 141 in favour, AFP reported.
The conservative government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has majority in a parliament and was widely expected to cesure the motion filed by the socialist PASOK party on Tuesday.
The motion came after a newspaper report claimed that an important sound recording from the night of the accident, which claimed 57 lives in February last year, had been misleadingly edited.
Opposition parties accused the government of planning the alleged editing in the sound recording as part of efforts to reinforce its chosen position that human error was to blame for the head-on collision.
Public opinion in Greece over train tragedy
Public opinion is that the the government are geared towards a cover-up of the train tragedy, parliament speaker for the main opposition Syriza party Nikos Pappas told the chamber Wednesday.
Opposition parties say the government handed out the edited recording to friendly media.
But Mitsotakis told the parliament that there was vever an order to conceal.
In what Mitsotakis has previously called a “national trauma”, he said that chronic failures by the state met human error, insisting that he wanted to speak “the truth” to a “distrustful and angry society”.
