The Public Prosecutor requested five years’ imprisonment on Wednesday, including four suspended, against Nadine Oliveira, tried since September 19 for unintentional homicides and injuries.
Le Monde with AFP
After more than two weeks of trial in Marseille, five years’ imprisonment, including four suspended probationary, were required on Wednesday October 5 against Nadine Oliveira. On December 14, 2017, she led the school bus struck by a TER on a level crossing, in Millas (Pyrénées-Orientales). Six children died.
Prosecutor Michel Sastre dismissed “fatality” in this accident, while highlighting the “exceptional dimension of this tragedy” in which 17 teenagers were also injured, including eight seriously. The Public Prosecutor’s Office, who has matched the assumption of care and compensation for victims, also asked for the cancellation of driving licenses (tourism and passenger transport) of the driver and the prohibition to iron these last for five years.
Nadine Oliveira, 53, is the only defendant in this trial which has been held since September 19 before the Marseille judicial court, which has a pole specializing in collective accidents covering the whole south of France. It is judged for homicides and involuntary injuries.
Difficult “trial on all sides”
“Yes, we are satisfied, but we know very well that it will not lead to five years in prison,” reacted Stéphan Mathieu, the father of a child who died in the accident: “It would be right and Symbolic that there are at least three years in prison, I think. After, with regard to the driving license, it is completely legitimate (…) a person cannot continue to do what they have done by having killed six children and injured 17 others seriously. So yes it is completely, yes, legitimate. “
Children’s lives have been removed, the physical and psychological health of children has been heavily shaken, familiar families, “said the prosecutor in his indictment, adding that” perpetuity “had already been inflicted on victims. Concounting that this trial was “difficult on all sides”, including for M Me oliveira, Michel Sastre nevertheless estimated that the “lack of empathy” of the driver could have been hard to live For victims.
no technical failure
However, “we are not on an accident in which we could see a form of fatality,” he said at the beginning of his indictment, but a “simple fault”: “It is undeniably emerging from The procedure that the accident could only occur only a direct result of the imprudence, the inattention “of the driver of the coach, insisted the magistrate at the start of her indictment, adding that” no failure technical has not been observed “.
“This crossing of the closed level passage is the result of the routine”, this word that Nadine Oliveira “did not accept, she who says he is ultra-vigilant,” continued the representative of the public prosecutor. “It was content to deduce the lowered position of smooth as usual” without having had “basic, fundamental vigilance, of any professional driver”, completed Michel Sastre.
The prosecutor also required against Nadine Oliveira the final ban on having a professional and social activity related to road transport as well as a professional activity related to children. After the pleadings of the defense lawyers, the decision will be put under deliberate then made under “one to two months”, said the president, Céline Ballerini.