These summons come two months after the "severe" conclusions of the legal experts against the railway company.
The companies Réseau ferré de France (RFF) and the SNCF, implicated in an expert report, were summoned, as legal persons, by the investigating judges of Evry responsible for investigating the train disaster Bretigny-on-Orge, we learned on Wednesday August 20 from a judicial source.
"The hearings are scheduled for September," said a source familiar with the matter. They come two months after the "severe" conclusions of the legal experts against the railway company, which implicate a "deficit" of maintenance.
These summons are "the logical continuation of the expert report", estimated the judicial source. According to the Ebra press group, RFF and SNCF are summoned respectively on September 16 and 18 for an indictment.
"We have received the invitations. They are addressed to legal persons", and not to the leaders of the SNCF, confirmed to AFP Patrick Ropert, spokesperson for the SNCF, stressing that "from October 31, we wrote on our blog Bretigny.sncf.com the likelihood of an indictment".
This will give us access to the file and will enable us to enrich our understanding (of the facts) and to improve our "Vigirail" action program aimed at strengthening switch safety and modernizing maintenance, he added.
"A lack of maintenance quality"
A judicial investigation for homicides and involuntary injuries was opened by the Evry public prosecutor's office shortly after the accident of July 12, 2013, which killed seven people and injured dozens.
At the beginning of July, the legal experts mandated to investigate the causes of the accident had concluded that "the tilting of a splint" was indeed the cause of the accident, had reported the public prosecutor of Evry Eric Lallement.
A splint is a kind of metal staple connecting two rails: it broke when passing near this Essonne station of the Intercités train no. 3657 which linked Paris to Limoges.
The visual examination of the central part of the switch revealed "211 remarkable facts including a hundred defects which are not the result of the accident", according to the report of the experts. "The main cause is a lack of maintenance quality," they point out.
Anomalies "known to the SNCF"
Even though the station Bretigny, 40 km from Paris, "was known to SNCF services as a risk area", "very many shortcomings" were noted in the monitoring and traceability of operations on this site, underlines the report, which excludes " formally" any malicious act.
These anomalies were mostly "known to the SNCF or its agents, without being adequately remedied", according to the report.
The SNCF and RFF then "formally" denied any state of disrepair of the network, considering that it was subject to "constant surveillance".
In December, the president of the SNCF Guillaume Pepy had affirmed that if the SNCF was charged in this case, he "would not appeal".
source: Tempsreel.nouvelobs.com
Further information :
Crashdebug.fr: Brétigny disaster: experts point to a “state of disrepair…”
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