ATHENS – A 60-year-old stationmaster on duty only a few days when two trains collided head-on in Tempi, Greece, who was charged in the tragedy, was released from pre-trial detention to house arrest.

Under the terms, Vasilis Samaras is banned from traveling out the country and his release means that none of 41 people charged in the catastrophe are being detained as the case drags on, common in Greece.

Samaras was due to be held until Sept. 1 but got out a month early and is confined to his home until the trial, no word whether he is subject to an electronic bracelet for monitoring or how it will be confirmed he’s in the house.

Three fire department officials and a high-ranking member of the department appeared before an investigating judge and were given until October to present their defense, no trials expected to begin until the end of the year.

They are charged with the misdemeanor of dereliction of duty. The Hellenic Railway Regulatory Authority (RAS) President hasn’t presented her defense, facing charges of disrupting transport safety, a felony, as well as multiple counts of manslaughter, grievous bodily harm, and minor bodily harm due to negligence.

Samaras was jailed in March 2023, just after the February collision between a passenger train heading from Athens to Thessaloniki and a freight train on the same track, most of them university students returning from carnival.

He is charged with endangering transport safety and multiple counts of negligent homicide and bodily harm. The transport safety charge, a felony, potentially carries a life sentence. He said safety measures weren’t in place.

At his initial questioning he testified about the events leading up to the crash in a 7 ½ hour testimony. “My client testified truthfully, without fearing if doing so would incriminate him,” Stephanos Pantzartzidis, his lawyer, told reporters. “The decision (to jail him) was expected, given the importance of the case,” he said.

But Pantzartzidis implied that others besides his client share blame, saying that judges should investigate whether more than one stationmaster should have been working in Larissa at the time of the collision.

“For 20 minutes, he was in charge of (train) safety in all central Greece,” the lawyer said of his client. Then Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis – who quit after the crash but wasn’t charged – said safety measures hadn’t fully been implemented.

Greek media at the time said the automated signaling system in the area of the crash was not functioning, making the stationmaster’s mistake possible as communication was with train drivers on two-way radios with manual switches.

(Material from the Associated Press was used in this report)