Eitan Moshe Biran, 5, the only survivor of a cable car crash in Northern Italy that killed 14 people, including five Israelis, is doing better and has started to eat “soft and light foods,” Italian daily Corriere della Sera reported on Monday.
According to the report, the doctors of the intensive care unit at the Regina Margherita Hospital in Turin, where the boy is hospitalized, have spoken of a significant improvement.
Eitan, however, does not yet know what happened to his family.
On May 23, a cabin of the Stresa-Mottarone cable car connecting the town on Lake Maggiore to the top of Mottarone Mountain plunged to the ground after the pulling cable broke.
Amit Biran, 30, his wife, Tal Peleg, 27, and their youngest son Tom, 2, were killed in the tragedy, together with Tal’s grandparents, the children’s great-grandparents, Barbara Cohen Konisky, 71, and Itshak Cohen, 82. Another eight Italian citizens, including a five-year-old boy, and an Iranian national also lost their lives.
On Wednesday, the investigators arrested three suspects, Luigi Nerini, 56, the owner of the company that operated the cable car (owned by local authorities); Gabriele Tadini, 63, the director of the service; and engineer Enrico Perocchio, 51.
Tadini confessed that he had deactivated the emergency brake system to allow the cable car to continue to operate in spite of some malfunctioning and accused Nerini and Perocchio of supporting his decision to avoid closing down the service for more extensive maintenance.
If the emergency brakes had been functioning when the pulling cable broke, the mechanism would have prevented the gondola from sliding back at a high speed and crashing into the mountain.
However, Nerini and Perocchio were released from custody early on Sunday after a judge partially rejected the preliminary conclusions of the investigators.
The judge said there was a complete lack of evidence against them apart from Tadini’s claims.
Tadini was also released to house arrest.
Italian media reported on Monday that those who worked at the cable car repeatedly followed the man’s instructions to leave on the clamps deactivating the brakes (the clamps are supposed to be used only during maintenance).
As of Monday, the investigators were examining the content of the cellphones of the three suspects to verify if any message supported the claim that the entrepreneur and the engineer knew about the practice.
According to Corriere della Sera, Nerini declared that he is ready to compensate the families of the victims with everything he owns.
In the meantime, the relatives of the Biran family are going to task an Italian lawyer to represent them in the trial.
“We will come to Italy to ask for justice,” Gali Peleg, Tal’s sister, said, according to the daily La Stampa. “They tried to save money and destroyed entire families.”