Swiss Alps landslide: five acquitted over 2017 deaths

A Swiss court on Friday acquitted five people charged with homicide by negligence after a 2017 landslide killed eight hikers and destroyed part of the village of Bondo in the Swiss Alps.

Four German, two Austrian and two Swiss hikers were buried in an Alpine valley in southeast Switzerland, close to the Italian border. The search was called off after two days.

Prosecutors in the Graubunden region had charged two cantonal employees, a forest ranger, a local official and a geologist after an investigation.

A spokesman for the Maloja Regional Court in Graubunden told AFP that all five defendants had been acquitted.

Keystone-ATS reported that the court found no evidence of clear warning signs predicting a major natural disaster in the weeks before the landslide. The court also found that the defendants had not acted negligently by failing to close hiking trails within the danger zone, according to the Swiss domestic news agency.

The hikers had set out in small groups to hike on Piz Cengalo, a 3,369-metre peak in the Bregaglia range. They were swept away by four million cubic metres of rock that cascaded down the mountain at 250 kilometres per hour, triggering a landslide that destroyed part of Bondo.

Local authorities had posted warnings in the village about danger on hiking trails after recent rockfalls. An alert system installed after a previous rockslide in 2011 allowed authorities to evacuate two mountain huts and about 100 Bondo residents before the landslide reached the village.