Austrian courts reproached at 10-year memorial of mountain-train fire

Nov 11, 2010, 12:40 GMT

Vienna - Family members of the victims who died in a 2000 blaze aboard a mountain train in Kaprun, Austria, chided the country's justice system as they marked the 10th anniversary of the disaster on Thursday.

A court in 2004 exonerated 16 indicted train constructors, operators and civil servants for the accident, in which 155 skiers and snowboarders died.

Uschi Geiger, who lost her teenage son, said in Kaprun that it was hard to bear the verdict.

'Many of us here stand alone with our sorrow and pain,' she was quoted as saying by the Austrian press agency APA.

Geiger addressed a group of 200 people during a ceremony at a ski resort in Salzburg province, which included victims' family members as well as Chancellor Werner Faymann and other officials.

The accident occurred on November 11, 2000, when a fire broke out in the back of a funicular train as it was headed up to the Kitzsteinhorn mountain through a tunnel.

Only 12 passengers were able to escape. The others died, most of them from inhaling smoke as the flames engulfed them.

A judge found that the blaze was caused by a heater installed in the train.

But he argued that the suspects had not violated any of the safety rules in place at the time for this particular kind of vehicle, and that it was impossible to establish individual guilt for any of them.

Chancellor Faymann said no verdict could make the disaster undone.

'We have the responsibility to improve safety measures,' he said, looking to the future.

Werner Kirnbauer, who also lost his son, said 'inhuman greed for profit and sloppiness' had caused the accident, referring to the fact that the train operator had not installed lights or other safety measures in the tunnel.

Many families are continuing to seek a retrial, even though all 451 relatives agreed to an out-of-court settlement worth a total of 13.9 million euros (19.3 million dollars).

Skiers and snowboarders from Austria, Germany, the United States, Japan, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Britain and the Czech Republic died in the blaze.

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