Three people detained overnight in relation to Sunday's cable-car disaster in Piedmont have admitted being responsible for what happened, investigators said on Wednesday.
The crash of a cable car connecting the Lake Maggiore resort of Stresa to the summit of the Mottarone mountain at some 1,500 metres above sea level killed 14 people and left a five-year-old boy fighting for his life.
The three suspects are the owner of the company that ran the cable car, the company's director and the service's operational chief.
They were allegedly involved in deliberately deactivating the emergency braking system, after it repeatedly kicked in following a series of recent technical problems.
It seems that the emergency brakes should have held the car steady after one of the cables broke on Sunday.
Instead the car seems to have slid back until it hit a pylon and then plunged to the ground.
Olimpia Bossi, the chief prosecutor of the city of Verbania, said the investigation had uncovered a "serious, disturbing" scenario.
She said it was a "conscious act" of the three suspects to insert an instrument that deactivated the braking system and then fail to remove it.
"A risk that, unfortunately, had a fatal outcome was run in the conviction that the cable would never break," Bossi said.
Investigators said the cable car had shown several "anomalies" that led to several technical interventions that failed to resolve the problems.
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