A court in Italy has sentenced six Italian scientists and a government official to six years in prison for giving inadequate information to the city of L’Aquila just days before it was devastated by an earthquake in 2009 that killed 309 people.
Marco Billi, the single judge of the regional court, found the seven experts guilty of multiple manslaughter yesterday following a trial that has drawn international condemnation and warnings that the scientific community will not dare to speak out on the subject of possible earthquakes in the future.
The defence had argued the impossibility of accurately predicting quakes. But the judge said the seven members of a national commission for forecasting and preventing major risks had provided “inexact, incomplete and contradictory” information after their meeting on March 31 2009, which followed months of tremors in the area in central Italy that had opened up cracks in some buildings.