Emergency brake on Italian cable car that killed 14 was disabled, police say
- Three managers were arrested following the disaster that killed all aboard apart from a five-year-old Israeli boy who remains in hospital
- The trio are accused of deliberately deactivating the brake that could have stopped the car slamming into the Mottarone mountain when the cable snapped
A five-year-old boy, the only survivor of Sunday’s tragedy on the Mottarone mountain overlooking Lake Maggiore in northwest Italy, remains in serious condition in hospital.
The three suspects are accused of deliberately deactivating the brake that could have stopped the car flying backwards when the cable snapped, to avoid delays following a malfunction.
“The public prosecutors’ office has ordered three arrests for removal or omission of precautions against accidents at work,” a spokesman for the Carabinieri police said.
Italian news agencies named the trio as Luigi Nerini – the head of Ferrovie del Mottarone, the firm which manages the cable car – and two other managers, Gabriele Tadini and Enrico Perocchio.
Local Carabinieri police official Alberto Cicognani told Radiotre radio station that the emergency brake had been deactivated.
“There were malfunctions in the cable car, the maintenance team was called,” he said, with the most recent intervention reportedly on May 3.
But “they did not fix the problem, or only in part,” Cicognani added.
“To avoid further interruptions in the service, they chose to leave in ‘the fork’, which prevents the emergency brake from working.”
Cicognani claimed all three men admitted what had happened.
Local chief prosecutor Olimpia Bossi later told reporters the fork had been inserted “several times”, suggesting the cable car had been unsafe for some time.
“Certainly Sunday was not the first day and this has been admitted,” Bossi told a press conference.
“This was a deliberate omission.”
Officials at the hospital in Turin treating the young survivor, whose parents, great-grandparents and two-year-old sibling were all killed in the crash, said on Wednesday that he had reopened his eyes.
“His reawakening is continuing and a short while ago he was extubated,” Citta della Salute hospital director Giovanni La Valle told reporters, but added that the situation remained “delicate”.
He suffered injuries to his skull, chest and abdomen as well as various leg fractures, media reports said.
The bodies of his family members, all of them Israelis, were taken from the mortuary near the crash site on Wednesday to be flown to Israel.
It was the first fatal incident involving a cable car in Italy since 1998, when a low-flying US military jet severed a cable at a ski resort, killing 20 people.
It came at the start of the country’s much-anticipated reopening to tourists after coronavirus closures, although the cable car at Mottarone, which was built in 1970, had been operating since late April.
“No one could imagine that what was a Sunday outing could turn into a nightmare that ended tragically,” Bossi told said on Tuesday.
