The investigation is moving forward into the fall of a cable car on Sunday in Stresa in northern Italy.
Three men were arrested on Wednesday for the tragedy which left 14 people dead.
These people, senior officials of the company managing the cable car, are suspected of having voluntarily 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 connection, they chose to leave in place the "fork" which prevents the entry into function of the emergency brake ", explained on Radiotre a local official of the carabineers, Lieutenant-Colonel Alberto Cicognani. .
An informed decision according to the prosecutor
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. “They recognized” that it was on purpose. that the emergency brake had not been activated, 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 decision to proceed with these arrests came after a day of interrogations at the Stresa rifle barracks and the analysis of the debris found there.
These investigations made it possible to demonstrate that "the emergency braking system of the empty cabin had been tampered with", and that the "fork", namely the device allowing to deactivate 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 therefore shutdown ”of the installation.
One child for sole survivor
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 solve 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 around 12:30 a.m., 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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