A court provisionally releases those accused of the cable car crash in Stresa

An Italian court has provisionally released the three defendants in the case of the collapse, last week, of a cable car in Stresa (in the Piedmont region, in the north of Italy) that killed 14 people, including a family of five Israelis.

Among them is the person in charge of the cable car service, Gabriele Tadini, now under house arrest, who has assured investigators that “all the fault is his” and “now it is his turn to make peace with God.” Likewise, Tadini has assured that “he never would have ever thought that the cable break that led to the tragedy could happen”.

Along with him, the owner of the company, Luigi Nerini, and the chief operating officer, Enrico Perocchio, have also been accused.

The court has made the decision to release the defendants, for the moment, because it does not suspect that they will flee the country or have the possibility of altering the evidence, according to ‘Corriere della Sera’. All of them are charged with multiple counts of manslaughter and negligence.

The detainees have allegedly justified their actions in the economic damage that would have implied interrupting the cable car service, which ‘a priori’ would have remained stopped for a long period of time in the event of having carried out the repairs that were necessary so that all the parts of the system were working properly.

The hint of human error was the main hypothesis that the researchers were considering to explain why the cabin fell to the void about 20 meters. The experts had detected a possible problem with the braking system that the detainees have not only corroborated but also attributed to a business decision.

Thus, the prosecutor Olimpia Bossi has pointed out the possible manipulation of one of the braking system forks, apparently to avoid blocking the cable car and because there were problems that required a deeper repair that would have meant interrupting the service.

A police officer, Alberto Cicocgnani, has assured in a radio interview that the three detainees have already admitted that they manipulated the system and deactivated the emergency brake voluntarily.

According to their version, they called for maintenance at first, but it only solved the problem “partially” so, “to avoid further interruptions”, they chose to leave the fork that separates the brake shoes.