Former boss of Italian motorways sentenced to 12 years over Genoa bridge tragedy

The Morandi Bridge after its collapse in August 2018. It was one of the worst tragedies in modern Italian history. Photograph: Luca Zennaro/EPA View image in fullscreen The Morandi Bridge after its collapse in August 2018. It was one of the worst tragedies in modern Italian history. Photograph: Luca Zennaro/EPA Former boss of Italian motorways sentenced to 12 years over Genoa bridge tragedy Giovanni Castellucci among 32 people convicted over the 2018 Morandi Bridge collapse, which killed 43 Thirty-two people, including the former chief executive of Italy’s motorway operator, have been convicted over the 2018 collapse of a Genoa bridge in which 43 people died. In a hushed courtroom on Thursday in the north-western Italian city, Giovanni Castellucci, former boss of Autostrade per l’Italia, was sentenced to 12 years in prison, the highest in the case. He had been on trial alongside 56 others over the collapse of the Morandi Bridge, ​which saw a 50-metre section of the bridge fall away, sending vehicles plunging down on to warehouses and a riverbed beneath the flyover during a summer storm. It was one of the worst tragedies in modern Italian history. Castellucci was convicted of complicity in multiple counts of manslaughter through negligence. His lawyers said he would appeal, saying that as CEO their client had relied on Italy’s leading engineers. They branded the verdict “a defeat for the truth”. There was silence as the judge read out the verdicts in a courtroom packed with about 400 relatives of the victims , lawyers, journalists and members of the public. Some relatives embraced and wept. Others said they needed time to come to terms with what the court had decided. “We need to better understand the ruling; there are a large number of defendants involved,” Egle Possetti, a spokesperson for the victims, who lost her sister, brother-in-law and her sister’s two children in the tragedy, told Reuters. All of the defendants had denied wrongdoing. In all, 32 people were convicted and handed sentences ranging from one year and 11 months to 12 years. Others were either found not guilty, or lesser charges had expired under the statute of limitations. The trial became both a search for accountability over one of Italy’s worst infrastructure disasters and a test of the country’s notoriously slow justice system. The collapse of the 51-year-old Morandi Bridge stunned Italy and exposed deep concerns over the safety of the country’s ageing infrastructure. Prosecutors argued that years of neglected maintenance, ignored warning signs and repeated delays to safety works contributed to the collapse, alleging that essential repairs were postponed while the motorway operator continued to generate and distribute profits. The defence rejected those claims , arguing that the disaster was caused by a fatal flaw in the bridge’s original design, specifically the failure of stay cable No 9, and that no maintenance programme could have prevented the collapse. In a statement