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Four guilty over Swiss air crash | |
(about 8 hours later) | |
A Swiss court has found four employees of an air traffic control firm guilty of manslaughter over the deaths of 71 people in a mid-air collision in 2002. | |
Three of the four managers convicted were given suspended prison terms and the fourth was ordered to pay a fine. | |
Another four employees of the Skyguide firm were cleared of any wrongdoing. | |
Prosecutors had said a "culture of negligence" at the firm contributed to the mid-air collision, which killed mostly Russian children. | |
The charter aircraft carrying Russian children to a holiday in Spain collided with a cargo plane in Swiss airspace on 1 July 2002. The wreckage came down in Germany. | |
'Organisational deficiencies' | |
All eight men on trial had maintained their innocence. Seven had continued working for Skyguide until the time of the verdict. | |
The BBC's Imogen Foulkes, in Berne, says it is significant that the four Skyguide employees acquitted were all air traffic controllers - rather than managers. | |
She says this shows the judges backed the prosecution's view that the managers at Skyguide were responsible for introducing negligent, potentially dangerous working practices. | |
Two separate investigations have already found what were described as organisational deficiencies within Skyguide. These deficiencies were said to have contributed to the accident. | |
Controller stabbed | Controller stabbed |
The trial revealed that minutes before the crash a single air traffic controller was in charge of 15 planes: He made 118 radio contacts with them, and he was guiding a plane into land. | |
Technical repairs were being carried out and some radar systems were not working. | Technical repairs were being carried out and some radar systems were not working. |
The air traffic controller in question was later stabbed and killed by the father of two of the children who died. | |
At the time, Skyguide insisted that having just one air traffic controller on duty was normal - but it has since outlawed the practice, and provided financial compensation to some of the bereaved families. | |
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