In a voluntary deposition given on August 26 to appellate judge-investigator Sotiris Bakaïmis, Christos Papadimitriou, the recently resigned deputy president of Greece’s state railway accident investigation authority (EODASAAM), described in detail how the agency’s final report was put together and the extraordinary pressures faced by foreign experts involved in the probe.
Papadimitriou’s account focuses heavily on the role of two investigators from the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA), who were brought in to help determine the cause of the massive fireball that followed the collision. According to his testimony, the two experts — Jean-Marc Accou and Carpinelli — were angered by what they perceived as interference from members of EODASAAM’s own council. In emails, they accused the Greek officials of resisting their conclusions, with Accou warning that he would “not accept any intervention” in the committee’s work and even threatening to walk away from the investigation altogether if the pressure continued.
The stakes could hardly have been higher. Papadimitriou testified that ERA officials left open the possibility of suspending operations across Greece’s entire railway network if urgent safety measures were not taken within a very short timeframe. In a meeting with Deputy Transport Minister Konstantinos Kyranakis in April 2025, the foreign experts reportedly confronted Greek officials directly, insisting that their work had been flawless and rejecting suggestions of mishandling.
The question of what caused the fireball remains one of the most contentious aspects of the Tempi tragedy. Greece’s Fire Service initially attributed it to the combustion of silicone oil from transformers carried by the freight train.
But Thessaloniki chemical engineering professor Athanasios Konstantopoulos, consulted by EODASAAM, dismissed that theory and instead raised the possibility that the train was carrying an illegal load of volatile fuel. This view was later echoed in the committee’s first official report, released on February 27, which concluded that the fireball was consistent with the ignition of several tonnes of highly flammable liquid.
Not everyone within EODASAAM agreed. Papadimitriou told the magistrate that members of the authority’s council expressed dissatisfaction with earlier findings by Sweden’s RISE Institute, and later insisted that the investigation adopt advanced computer simulation methods recommended by the University of Pisa.
At one stage, he said, board members disclosed that a Greek consultant working with ERA had already run such simulations and sent them to Belgium’s University of Ghent for verification — even before Ghent’s final report was available.
The behind-the-scenes disputes highlighted deep divisions over scientific methods and the credibility of foreign versus domestic expertise. Papadimitriou himself, a lawyer by profession who served as deputy head of the railway division at EODASAAM from September 2023 until his resignation in April 2025, said he was impressed by the scientific rigor of the ERA investigators. He described how they not only authored the bulk of the fireball chapter in the final report but also trained their two Greek counterparts in international best practices.
Yet as the inquiry progressed, those methodological disputes escalated into outright confrontations. What began with a rejected theory about silicone oil soon evolved into bitter arguments over whether the freight train had been carrying five tonnes of an unidentified, highly flammable liquid. For weeks, the prospect loomed that ERA might go so far as to brand the Greek railway system unsafe and recommend its closure until sweeping safety reforms were made.
Papadimitriou ended his testimony by stressing that he remains at the disposal of the Greek judiciary. He offered to submit further documents and correspondence to back up his account, including evidence of the tense exchanges between Greek officials and foreign experts.
His revelations, while couched in careful institutional language, expose just how fraught the Tempi investigation became — and how close Greece came to facing not only a national tragedy, but the suspension of its entire railway network.
