Fourteen people have been confirmed dead after a cable car plunged to the ground on a mountainside in northern Italy on Sunday morning.
The Italian government has launched an investigation into the cause of the incident on the Stresa-Mottarone line in the Piedmont region, while prosecutors seek to establish any criminal blame.
Just one of the fifteen passengers believed to have been inside the cable car at the time of the crash has survived.
A 5-year old Israeli boy, named by the Israeli foreign ministry as Eitan Biran, remains in hospital with several broken bones. Despite requiring emergency surgery at the Regina Margherita children’s hospital in Turin, he was conscious on arrival.
Among the dead are Eitan’s parents, Amit Biran and Tal Peleg-Biran, an Israeli-born couple who were living in Pavia and their two-year-old son, Tom.
Ms Peleg-Biran’s grandparents, Barbara and Yitzhak Cohen, also died at the scene. The Israeli ministry say that the couple had arrived in Italy on 19 May to visit their granddaughter and great-grandchildren.
The Israeli embassy say that it is working to help repatriate the bodies to Israel.
Six of the crash victims are believed to be Israeli, while the rest are Italian residents including one Iran-born man, Italian media reports.
One of those killed was a nine-year-old boy, who died in hospital after suffering two cardiac arrests, according to medical officers.
Hospital spokesman Pier Paolo Berra commented that after trying to restart his heart several times, “there was nothing more we could do”.
Italy’s transport minister Enrico Giovannini has announced a commission investigating the “technical and organisational” causes of the incident.
Preliminary checks of the cable line’s safety and maintenance record show that the whole lift structure was renovated in August 2016 and checked in 2017, the ministry said.
They added that the lift’s cables, including the one that pulls the cars up the mountain and the support cable that holds the cars, were inspected late last year.
Stresa mayor Marcella Severino said that it appeared that a cable had snapped and that the car reeled back down the line until it hit a pylon and fell.
“It was a terrible, terrible scene,” Ms Severino told Italy’s SkyTG24.
The car overturned “two or three times before hitting some trees,” she said, adding that some of the bodies had been thrown from it and were found among the trees.
A spokesperson for the Alpine Rescue service, Walter Milan, said that the cable car “crumpled” after falling from a particularly high point of the cable line. The car is believed to have fallen upwards of 50 feet.
Italian prime minister Mario Draghi offered his condolences to the victims and their families.
“I express condolences on behalf of the whole government to the families of the victims, with a special thought for the seriously injured children and their families,” he said.
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