Two years after the Mottarone tragedy , in which 14 people died , the Public Prosecutor's Office of Verbania has closed the investigation in view of the request for trial for 8 suspects .
Recipients of the notice of conclusion of the investigation, in addition to the two companies, are Luigi Nerini , owner of the Mottarone Railways, Enrico Perocchio , operations manager, Gabriele Tadini , head of service, and, for Leitner, in charge of maintenance, Anton Seeber , president of the BoD, Martin Leitner , Managing Director and Peter Rabanser , Head of Customer Service.
We go towards archiving for 6 external technicians whose position has been removed .
The investigations , conducted by the Carabinieri , were coordinated by the Prosecutor of Verbania Olimpia Bossi and the prosecutor Laura Correra . The crimes alleged for various reasons are attacks on transport safety, removal or willful omission of precautions against accidents at work, culpable disaster, multiple manslaughter, very serious culpable injuries and only for Tadini and Perocchio also forgery.
From the initial investigations, based on the stories of people informed about the facts and the material seized, the two central themes immediately emerged: the severed cable and the failure of the safety braking system due to the insertion of the so-called "forks" to avoid that the cabin, which then crashed with the passengers on board, blocked during the ride.
For this Nerini, Perocchio and Tadini were stopped by the prosecutors in the night between 25 and 26 May but the examining magistrate, deeming there were no conditions (the danger of escape), did not validate the arrest: on the evening of 29 May he released the first two and ordered house arrest only for Tadini recognizing the serious indications against him based on the first testimonies. A decision which, for a formal matter, opened a clash between robes that reached up to the CSM, while the proceeding was reassigned to another judge.
A few months later, the new investigating judge accepted the request for a probationary incident and appointed two panels of experts to shed light on the causes of the accident. At the same time, the Public Prosecutor's Office registered 11 other people in the register of suspects: Leitner with his top management, the Ferrovie del Mottarone company as an entity and a group of 6 technicians, those now removed in view of the filing request, employees of super companies specialists who, in subcontracting, took care of the checks and also the one who made the cast head of the cable car.
The expert reports , filed last September and which then induced the investigators to reduce the list of suspects, reconstructed the deficiencies in the controls and management of the system : they found that the rope was corroded well before the accident and a correct maintenance could have detected it. And then the constant use of forks that left no way out.
In the accident , which took place around 12.15 on 23 May, 14 people lost their lives, including two children .
Only little Eitan, five years old at the time, survived .
(Unioneonline/vl)