Barcelona, Feb 2 (EFE) .- The accident of “El Péndulo” in the Tibidabo park in Barcelona, in which a minor died and three girls were injured, has resulted today in sentences of between a year and a half and two years in prison for ten involved in the design, manufacture, installation and maintenance of the attraction.
In an “in voce” sentence, which is final, the head of Barcelona’s criminal court number 22 has sentenced the ten defendants for the fall of “El Péndulo” after they have agreed with the Prosecutor’s Office and private accusations on a sentence that allows them to avoid prison.
The agreement, which the judge has formalized today after the ten defendants have accepted the facts attributed to them by the Prosecutor’s Office, is the result of three weeks of negotiations between the parties, once the insurance companies compensated 1.8 million euros to the victims and their families.
Within the framework of this agreement, the Prosecutor’s Office – which initially accused twelve people of the accident and requested sentences of three and a half years in prison – has agreed to reduce the sentences to a maximum of two years in prison, applying the mitigating factors of undue delay and reparation. of the damage, and drop the charges for two of the defendants.
Most of the accused have settled for sentences of two years in prison, although there are also technicians sentenced to a year and a half in prison and a year and nine months in prison, with the same period of disqualification.
The ten defendants, who include the manufacturers of the attraction “El Péndulo” to the engineers involved in its installation and assembly and the technicians who were entrusted with its periodic review, have today agreed to a sentence that condemns them for a crime of reckless homicide and two of reckless injury with deformity.
Once the agreement was formalized, and with the magistrate’s warning that his sentence “in voce” would become final, Enrico Fabri, owner of the Italian company that built “El Péndulo”, has expressed his respect for the pain of the victims of the accident, happened in 2010.
Fabri has specified that, “beyond the conventional act of trial held today”, he wants to express his apologies to the victims and their families for “the consequences that may have been caused by possible errors” in the design of the attraction.
According to the extrajudicial pact prior to the trial, the relatives of the minor who died in the accident have received half a million euros, a girl who suffered serious leg damage 1.2 million and two other minor injuries about 100,000 euros total.
Upon reaching this economic pact, the private accusations have decided to renounce claiming compensation through civil proceedings from the insurance companies and the Barcelona City Council, as subsidiary civil liability.
“El Péndulo” del Tibidabo, a 40-meter-high free-fall attraction that had been inaugurated in 2006, collapsed on July 17, 2010, killing a 15-year-old girl and injuring three other teenagers.
The attraction, made in Italy and the first of its kind to work in Spain, had a 25-meter-long oscillating arm located more than 40 meters high that simulated a free fall into the void for visitors.
The mechanism dropped four people sitting in its cabin at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour and they had to withstand a force of gravity of 4.5.