Unhealed wounds, 10 years after Austrian train fire (Feature)

By Albert Otti Nov 9, 2010, 2:06 GMT

Vienna - In the 10 years since the mountain railway fire in Kaprun, Austria, verdicts have been passed, compensation has been paid, and the tunnel in which 155 skiers burned to death has been sealed with a metal door.

But for survivors and many family members of victims, their wounds

have not healed and their legal battles are not over, as they cannot accept that no-one has been held criminally responsible for the inferno.

'I hope there will be justice one day,' said 73-year-old Hermann Geier from Germany, one of only 12 people who got out of the burning funicular train alive. 'We can't let it stand as it is.'

Like many winter other sports enthusiasts, Geier entered the train on the brilliant sunny morning of November 11, 2000, to ride up through the mountain tunnel to the Kitzsteinhorn peak.

Shortly after leaving the station, a heater started burning in the back of the train. The blaze spread through the carriage and up the unlit tunnel.

Skiers and snowboarders from Austria, Germany, the United States, Japan, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Britain and the Czech Republic died. A quarter of the victims were children and teenagers. The youngest was five.

A court in the regional capital Salzburg ruled in 2004 that all 16 defendants were not guilty.

As there were no rules mandating better security or fire precautions or banning the installation of certain heaters on such vehicles at the time, the accused mountain train employees, ministry officials and representatives of the train builder had not broken any laws.

The judge also argued that a fire in such a train was not part of a risk scenario that engineers were obliged to take into consideration, an argument that was widely criticised by family members.

Despite an unsuccessful appeal, Austrian lawyer Gerhard Podovsovnik has filed three cases at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

The lawyer charges that the judge and court-appointed experts were biased.

'There's this infinite disappointment in our legal system,' said Johannes Stieldorf, a Vienna lawyer who lost his 18-year-old son Matthaeus in the blaze.

But Stieldorf is among those family members who have not joined the ongoing legal battles.

There is no way to sue for additional damages, he argues, because the 451 family members agreed to an out-of-court settlement of 13.9 million euros (19.3 million dollars) in total.

Whether or not anyone is ever held responsible for installing a household heater in a high-tech train, or for not having passed adequate government regulations, nothing can make up for the loss, Stieldorf said.

For its part, the Kaprun railway operator issued a letter of apology over the weekend, in which the company took moral, but not legal responsibility for the catastrophe.

'We ask for forgiveness that all our efforts were not sufficient to prevent the disaster,' the management wrote.

In the decade since the blaze, Kaprun has tried hard to look to the future and successfully rebuilt its reputation. After all, the community's 3,000 inhabitants depend on income from some 130,000 guests who arrive each year.

But a sense of closure is still evasive in Kaprun.

'We were in a state of shock, the inconceivable had happened, and we are still trying to come to terms with it,' said Mayor Norbert Karlsboeck.

On the 10th anniversary on Thursday, Chancellor Werner Faymann and other politicians are scheduled to descend on the mountain village for a ceremony.

Their presence and their speeches are unlikely to heal any wounds.

'We would rather be left in peace,' Stieldorf said.

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