Mine Owner Arrested Over Dam Disaster
Authorities arrested an owner of the mine whose dam collapsed last week, wiping out an Alpine resort, and charged him with involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of more than 200 tourists and villagers, prosecutors said today.
Giulio Rota, a co-owner of the Prealpi Mining Co., was arrested Tuesday night and is being questioned, Trento Prosecutor Francesco Simeoni said.
Simeoni interrogated Rota for several hours Saturday as part of efforts to see if negligence caused the earthen dam to give way at noon Friday, unleashing a torrent of mud, water and debris onto the hamlet of Stava in northeastern Italy.
More than 60 other people, many of them area government officials, have been given official notices by the prosecutor that they are wanted for questioning.
Two of them--Gianni Bazzanella, who heads the regional Department of Industry, and Remo Iori, chief of the Forest Service--resigned today.
By this morning, rescue workers digging through the mountain of mud, which flattened three hotels and a score of houses, had recovered 202 bodies, 34 of them unidentified.
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