Italy: three arrests in the investigation into the fall of the cable car

kings men were arrested Wednesday, May 26 as part of the investigation into the fall of a cable car Sunday in Stresa in northern Italy, which killed 14 people, including 5 Israelis, said the riflemen. These men, senior officials of the company managing the cable car, are suspected of having intentionally deactivated the structure’s emergency brake. “There was a malfunction on the cable car, the handling team did not solve the problem, or only partially. To avoid the interruption of the link, they chose to leave the fork which prevents the entry into operation of the emergency brake, ”explained on Radiotre a local officer in charge of the riflemen, Lieutenant-Colonel Alberto Cicognani, quoted by the Italian agencies.

The three people arrested are Luigi Nerini, the manager of the company Ferrovie del Mottarone which manages the cable car, Gabriele Tadini, director of the cable car, and Enrico Perocchio, operational manager of the cable car, built in 1970 and which connects the village of Stresa in 20 minutes. to Mount Mottarone, which rises to almost 1,500 meters, offering spectacular views of Lake Maggiore and the Alps. “They recognized” that the emergency brake had not been activated on purpose, said Alberto Cicognani. According to prosecutor Olimpia Bossi, quoted by the Italian media, they knew that the cable car cabin had been running without emergency brakes since April 26, the day the installation reopened.

The “tampered with” emergency braking system

The decision to proceed with these arrests came at the end of a day of interrogations at the Stresa rifle barracks and the analysis of the debris found on the spot, which made it possible to demonstrate that “the braking system of emergency cabin that had fallen into the void had been tampered with ”, and that the“ fork ”, namely the device for deactivating the brake, had been inserted. According to the investigators, this is a “material act done in a conscious manner” to “avoid interruptions and the stopping of the cable car”, while “the installation presented anomalies which would have required a more radical intervention with a consequent shutdown ”of the installation.

According to the prosecutor, technical interventions had been “requested and carried out”, including one on May 3, but “they did not make it possible to resolve the problem”. The decision to lock the emergency brake was taken “with the conviction that the cable would never have broken, running a risk which then unfortunately led to the fatal outcome”. The accident happened at around 12:30 p.m. (10:30 a.m. GMT), about 100 meters from the last altitude station of the cable car to the top of Mount Mottarone. The only survivor of the accident, a five-year-old child hospitalized in Turin, suffers from a head trauma and broken legs.


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