Police arrest three over Italian cable car disaster, say emergency brake deactivated

Italy’s carabinieri police arrested three men on Wednesday over a cable car crash that killed 14 people, saying the emergency brake system had been deactivated to overcome a fault.

On Sunday the gondola on a cable way connecting the northern town of Stresa, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, to the nearby Mottarone mountain plunged to the ground, killing all aboard apart from a five-year-old Israeli boy who remains in hospital.

The bodies of five other victims from Israel – a young couple, their child and their grandparents – were being sent home on Wednesday. Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation into suspected involuntary manslaughter and negligence.

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.

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.