The trial of this accident which left 7 dead and more than 400 injured in 2013 opened on Monday. Me Gérard Chemla regrets that the track agents and the management are not also on the dock.
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“It wasn’t just society [SNCF] who was to appear, but more natural persons”, deplores Tuesday April 26 on franceinfo Me Gérard Chemla, lawyer for 26 civil parties and the association Mutual assistance and defense of victims, the day after the opening of the trial of the Brétigny-sur-Orge rail disaster (Essonne). In this case, SNCF, SNCF Réseau and a former SNCF executive are being prosecuted. If the old frame has “a part of the responsibility, it is a regret on our part that he is all alone”, says the lawyer. He claims to have asked “throughout the instruction” to the judges “to be interested both in track agents who did not do their job and who hid it by reports that were manifestly false or insufficient, and to also be interested in the management because, at the SNCF, everyone knew and nobody did anything”.
>> Brétigny-sur-Orge disaster: “Overwhelming listening showed that the defense system organized in the SNCF aimed to hide everything that could be hidden”, according to Me Chemla.
The trial of this disaster, which caused the death of seven people and injured more than 400 in 2013, opened on Monday and is expected to last six weeks. The railway company maintains that the accident was unpredictable and defends the thesis of a metallurgical defect, which denounces Me Gérard Chemla, lawyer for 26 civil parties. He doesn’t believe “absolutely not” to this hypothesis and accuses the SNCF of wanting “to reconstruct a story, by paying a high price for experts who come to explain almost anything to us”. “For years the inquest has been dragging around these claims of a faulty part, but the reality is that the metal part that held the splint [pièce métallique qui assure la jonction entre deux rails]had been cracked since 2008”, according to Me Gérard Chemla.
The lawyer points like this “the decay of the network”. For him, “The evolution of this crack was not followed, the dismantling of joints to check what state it was in was not carried out and the piece of wood was in a pitiful state. When you maintain a network badly, that the rails and the armament parts are totally dilapidated, anything can happen”, summarizes Me Gérard Chemla. He believes that this “we had known for years that at this place it was not well maintained or well maintained”.