Italy cable car: Video suggests emergency brake disabled years before

A red fork-shaped clamp was visible on the emergency brake after the 23 May disaster

A cable car expert has alleged that earlier videos he took suggest the emergency brake was already disabled in 2014 on the mountain cable car that plunged near Lake Maggiore in Italy.

Fourteen people were killed and a boy was critically injured in the disaster.

The technician has already admitted installing a fork-shaped bracket to deactivate the emergency brake.

Michael Meier, who filmed the cable car several times, said the same bracket was in use as early as 2014.

An emergency brake would have prevented the disaster from happening, investigators say.

"I noticed that on these photos these forks can already be seen," he told German public broadcaster ZDF. Mr Meier used the Italian word forchettone to describe the brackets he had captured.

He has worked in the industry for years but visited the Mottarone cable car several times as an enthusiast, as he highlights in a compilation on YouTube.

Mr Meier says the grey fork brackets (circled top left) were already in place when he visited on 6 January 2014

Pictures taken of the four Mottarone cable cars from both January 2014 and June 2018 appear to show fork brackets already in place. He says the brackets were grey in colour when he first filmed them, and four years later they were red.

What happened at Mottarone?

When the main cable holding the car snapped, there was no emergency brake to stop it reversing at over 100km/h (62mph) on a support cable, passing a support pylon and then plummeting to the ground and rolling down the mountain.

Five families were on board, including two children who were among the dead.

Eitan Biran, aged 5, was the sole survivor: he lost his parents and two-year-old brother, originally from Israel, and his great grandparents who were visiting. Doctors said on Monday he was now out of danger and being treated on an ordinary hospital ward in Turin. His aunt has been at his bedside.

ZDF said it had handed the footage to Italian prosecutors after getting the view of Swiss specialist Prof Gabor Oplatka, who said the operators had been fortunate up to that point "because damage to cable cars is relatively rare".

• Three arrested over fatal Italy cable car crash

Prosecutor Olimpia Bossi had already told reporters that the fork bracket had been "applied to avoid continuous disruptions and blockages of the cable car" although it had not been thought there was any risk of the cable breaking.

'He is not a criminal'

Lawyer Marcello Perillo, who is acting for the cable car technician, Gabriele T, said on Sunday that his client had admitted using the fork to disable the emergency brake as it kept locking by itself while the cable car was in operation.

The cable car fell down a steep slope, and was stopped by trees

"He is not a criminal and would never have let people go up with the braking system blocked had he known that there was even a possibility that the cable would have broken," the lawyer told reporters. He did not say for how long the forks had been in use.

Judge Donatella Banci Buonamici allowed all three suspects to leave jail on Sunday. She said there was no evidence to suggest either the owner or maintenance chief were aware the brake had been disabled on several occasions before the 23 May tragedy. They deny any knowledge of it.

The technician is now under house arrest but all three are still under criminal investigation.