The prosecutor's office in Évry has demanded a trial for homicides and involuntary injuries against SNCF and a railwayman, six years after the Brétigny-sur-Orge disaster in Essonne, which left seven dead and dozens injured, he announced Friday. The railwayman, 24 years old at the time, was at the head of a lane inspection brigade at the time of the derailment in July 2013. He was the one who carried out the last check, eight days before the disaster. . It is now up to the examining magistrates to decide whether to send them to the criminal court or not. Sollicité, the lawyer of the SNCF, Emmanuel Marsigny, indicated "not being able to communicate" on a document of which he had "not known".
>> READ ALSO - Accident Brétigny: nearly 1,000 maintenance agents were missing
On July 12, 2013, the train Intercités Paris-Limoges had derailed station Brétigny-sur-Orge in Essonne when a splint - kind of big clip that keeps two consecutive rails - had rotated, causing the accident. The toll of one of the worst railway disasters in France in the last twenty years was heavy: three deaths among train passengers, four among those waiting on the platform, and dozens wounded. The investigation excluded "any fault of the driver or any malicious act", explained the floor in a statement.
A piece of poorly maintained track causing the tragedy
The prosecution concluded that the train had derailed due to "maintenance defects", an "inadequate surveillance system", and "failures in the organization of human resources". During the five years of the investigation, all the court-ordered appraisals concluded that the train had derailed because of a piece of poorly maintained track that broke up over time. The SNCF estimates that the assembly incriminated gave way abruptly because of a defect in the steel, and therefore that the accident was unpredictable - an assumption that would clear customs.
The investigating judges had announced the end of their investigations in early 2019, after five years of investigation and an unexpected rebound: a few days before the closure, a senior officer of the SNCF had been indicted, also for homicide and unintentional injuries. Until then and despite repeated requests from families of victims who wanted to "put faces" on this disaster and see "men on the ground" or their hierarchy in court, only two legal entities had been indicted for involuntary homicides: SNCF and RFF (Réseau Ferré de France, the track manager, now SNCF Réseau, for whom the prosecution has also requested a referral to the court).