Detectives in Italy probing the devastating cable car crashed that killed 14 people say they believe the attractions brakes had been ‘tampered’ with.
The gondola connecting the northern Italian Alps town of Stresa, on the shores of Lake Maggiore to the 4,895-ft Mottarone peak plunged to the ground near its highest point on Sunday.
The crash killed all aboard aside from a five-year-old Israeli boy, Eitan Biran.
He remains in hospital after his entire family including his parents, grandparents and brother died.
Police have arrested three men in connection with the cable car disaster, saying an emergency brake system had been deactivated to overcome a fault.
(Image: ALESSANDRO DI MARCO/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Prosecutors suspect involuntary manslaughter and negligence, authorities in the northern Italian region of Piedmont say.
Police say the cable car’s brake failed to engage after a lead cable snapped, causing the carriage carrying the tourists to plummet to the ground where it crumpled in a wreck on Mottarone’s steep, wooded slopes.
Carabinieri Lieutenant colonel Alberto Cicognani told broadcaster RAI the suspects, who he did not name, admitted that a fork-shaped clamp had been placed on the safety brake system, preventing it from operating as it should.
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The cable car had not been working properly, with the brakes constantly kicking in. The clamp would stop them from activating, allowing the cable car to keep functioning.
“It is certainly very serious and very disturbing,” Olimpia Bossi, the chief prosecutor of the city of Verbania, told reporters after the arrests.
“With the conviction that the cable car would never break, (the men) took the risk which determined the deadly outcome,” Bossi said.
(Image: ALESSANDRO DI MARCO/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
A Carabinieri official in Verbania told the Reuters news agency the trio arrested were the manager of Ferrovie Mottarone, the company that manages the cable way, its director, and the manager of the cable way.
The cabin was nearing the end of its journey to the top of the Mottarone mountain when the lead cable snapped, around 65-ft above the ground.
The gondola slipped back very fast until it pulled off the cable and tumbled to earth, where it rolled over before hitting trees, police said.
(Image: repubblica.it)
The cable car underwent major maintenance work between 2014 and 2016.
Checks were carried out in 2017 and again last year by specialist technicians.
Most of the victims died at the scene, with bodies found inside the gondola’s red and white wreckage and some thrown into the woods.
Eitan suffered multiple broken bones and was airlifted to a hospital in Turin, where he remained in a critical condition this week after undergoing surgery.
The bodies of his family, including his brother Tom, 2, mother Tal Peleg-Biran, 26, father Amit Biran and great-grandparents, Barbara and Yitzhak Cohen, were being sent home to Israel on Wednesday.
Italians Vito Angelo Gasparro and Roberta Pistolato also died in the disaster, along with engaged couple Silvia Malnati and Alessandro Merlo.