While the civil parties had the floor, at the beginning of May, before the 31e chamber of the Paris criminal court, the father of a victim of the TGV Est accident, which occurred during a testing session on November 14, 2015 in Eckwersheim (Bas-Rhin), had summarized in a formula the attitude at the hearing of the six defendants: ” It’s not me, it’s another. »
Day after day, everyone blamed each other: the TGV driver, Denis T., and his colleague responsible for indicating the braking points, Francis L., as well as the representatives of the two main companies involved in carrying out the tests, SNCF and its subsidiary Systra. To this general denial, exasperating for the victims, the prosecutor Nicolas Hennebelle responded, Monday May 13, with almost general accusations of guilt: the accident, he asserted, was the result of a “collective blindness”.
“While these trials were intended to ensure the safety of future commercial travel on the new route [entre Paris et Strasbourg]everything seems to have been done to endanger the driving of the train”he summarized at the start of a four-hour monologue, during which he listed the “absurd decisions” leading to the tragedy.
These decisions are neither those of a single man nor of the single organization: “Wanting to reduce this file to the sole fault of this or that only serves to mask the organizational deficiencies of this project. Symmetrically, the accident does not come down to poor organization which exempts individuals from all responsibility. »
The drama unfolded just as much on November 14, 2015, in the TGV cabin, as it did upstream, in the offices of the SNCF and its subsidiaries, estimated the prosecutor, who asked the court to declare five of the six defendants guilty of homicide and involuntary injuries – in his eyes, Philippe B., agent responsible for informing the driver of the particularities of the lane (slope, etc.), played no role in determining a braking point too late approaching a sharp bend, the sole cause of the accident which left 11 dead and 42 injured.
“With a ladle”
It was Francis L. who defined the braking strategy. Nicolas Hennebelle castigated his ” lack of rigor “, which resulted in retaining a braking point “leaving no margin of safety”a determined braking point “without any scientific calculation, without any reliable analysis, without even having the skills and without tools”. ” To the experience “said the person concerned. “With a ladle”, the train driver had said. The latter is also responsible, according to the prosecutor, since he brought his “explicit validation” at the braking point, and even offered to delay it by a kilometer, thinking he had some room. A “manifest error of assessment” and an “gross recklessness”.
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