Julio Benitez, the driver of the train which crashed into Once station two weeks ago and left 99 injured will face trial under the charge of “derailing due to negligence”.
According to judicial sources, Federal Judge Ariel Lijo, who leads the investigation ordered the prosecution of Benitez, has pressed charges of criminal negligence against the suspect but ruled against keeping the railway employee imprisoned on remand.
The magistrate held the conductor responsible for removing the hard disk of a camera which recorded the incident. Following the damage that the device suffered as result of the impact, the images that were captured cannot be viewed nor recovered.
But according to other tests carried out on the locomotive ‘Chapa 5’, investigators discovered that Benítez had exceeded speed limits on several stages of the journey, while the driver maintained that he remembered nothing from the morning of the collision.
On October 19th, the Sarmiento rail line derailed and crashed into the second platform of Once’s train station leaving close to a hundred people injured.
Source:Buenos Aires Herald