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29 May 2021The validation hearing for the manager of the Mottarone cableway Luigi Nerini, the head of service Gabriele Tadini and the operating director Enrico Perocchio began in prison in Verbania since dawn on Wednesday for the disaster on Sunday 23 May when a cabin crashed killing 14 of the 15 tourists on board.



The three are heard by the investigating judge Donatella Banci Buonamici who will have to decide whether to validate the first measure taken by the Verbania prosecutor's office to avoid a possible escape and the precautionary custody order that puts on paper, in ten pages, the accusations for manslaughter plurimo, culpable injury, malicious removal of security systems.



Tadini, questioned by the chief prosecutor Olimpia Bossi and the prosecutor Laura Carrera, is the only one who admitted to having left the block on the brakes, preventing the cabin, once the hauling rope broke for reasons to be ascertained, from remaining anchored to the carrying cable. A "conscious" choice dictated by the continuous blockages of the braking system and therefore by the risk that the cable car would stop halfway, forcing the passengers to recover dangerously, but above all by the desire to avoid a long closure of the plant for maintenance. The decision for the judges is shared both with Nerini, defended by the lawyer Pasquale Pantano, and by the engineer Perocchio assisted by the defender Andrea Da Prato.



The two, stopped in the Stresa barracks after Tadini's confession but never heard from the prosecutors, would have endorsed it to avoid "economic repercussions".



The prosecutors believe in Tadini because it would be illogical to think that a simple employee alone makes a dangerous choice from which he has "no advantage". Nerini, according to the investigators "is operationally and daily involved in the operations of operation" and has an interest in forcing the security procedures in order not to lose the proceeds already almost zeroed by Covid. Even Perocchio, according to the prosecutor, "was absolutely aware of the anomalies that the braking system had been presenting for some time, as he knew that" more radical interventions were needed. " evidential pollution and the repetition of the crime.



The lawyer Marcello Perillo who assists Tadini will instead ask for house arrest in the face of genuine statements, according to him, that the 63-year-old employee is ready to repeat. No certainty about the defensive choices of the other two suspects, they could deny that they are aware of the use of the 'fork', nor if they ask to leave the prison. In the request for validation it also emerges that Tadini is being investigated for forgery, he admitted that on the day of the disaster and the one before he did not record in the newspaper register the presence of a "noise attributable to the presumed loss of pressure in the cabin braking system, which was repeated every 2-3 minutes ", to remedy which he decides - shortly after 9 on Sunday morning - to leave the red forks inserted.



The prosecutor works on the hypothesis that the alterations of public documents are much more numerous and that there is also an "involvement" of the other two arrested in falsifying the safety documents. At the end of the validation interrogations, the investigating judge Donatella Banci Buonamici will reserve, in all likelihood, on the choice of leaving them in prison before communicating her decision to the parties, in close proximity.



"And a hallucinating thing, even children whose lives have been taken have died. I am guarantor but if guilty they must give him life imprisonment", says a citizen who in front of the prison holds the sign 'If guilty life sentences. '. A few steps from the prison entrance, on the railing of a school there is a sheet 'A hug to little Eitan from all of us'. The only survivor of the tragedy is hospitalized at the Regina Margherita children's hospital in Turin.