Police arrest 3 over fatal Italian cable car tragedy
Flowers and a candle lie in front of the Stresa to Mottarone cable car departure station.
Italian police on Wednesday arrested three managers from the operator of a cable car that crashed into a mountain killing 14 people, accusing them of deliberately disabling the emergency brake.
A 5-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 are accused of deliberately deactivating the brake that could have stopped the car flying backward when the cable snapped, to avoid delays following a malfunction.
"It was a conscious choice, absolutely conscious," prosecutor Olimpia Bossi told reporters. "That's it.
"It was not an occasional omission or forgetfulness.
"It was a conscious decision to disarm ... to deactivate this emergency system in order to remedy what we have been told were problems, technical problems that were occurring on the line."
Italian news agencies named the three suspects 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.
Although a maintenance team reportedly came to fix those problems on May 3, they remained unresolved, local Carabinieri police official Alberto Cicognani told Radiotre radio.
