A more than ten years after the tragedy of the bus that fell from the Acqualonga viaduct of the A16 motorway, Gennaro Lametta, owner of the vehicle and the only defendant definitively sentenced, is back in the news.
From prison where he is serving a 9-year sentence, he filed a complaint with the Naples Prosecutor's Office against the two mechanics he had turned to for bus maintenance. The charge: false testimony.
According to his lawyers, Sergio Pisani and Angelo Argenzio, the complaint is supported by an audio recording which, according to the defense, would demonstrate that one of the two mechanics admitted to having carried out a check on the vehicle's transmission pins, a detail that was denied during the trial.
Lametta, whose brother died in the accident while he was driving the vehicle, claims to have secretly recorded that conversation in the workshop, a few days after the massacre that cost the lives of 40 people, which occurred on July 28, 2013 near Monteforte Irpinian.
“If external causes are excluded,” Lametta writes in the complaint, “the only thing that remains is human error by the mechanics, who after the tragedy denied having tightened the pins of the transmission system.” According to his reconstruction, the detachment of those pins would have caused the joint to fail and the brakes to malfunction.
An element that, according to the defense, was not adequately explored during the trial and that could now open up new scenarios. In addition to the crime of false testimony, Lametta is in fact asking that the possible involvement in multiple manslaughter and manslaughter be assessed, in the event that it is ascertained that the lack of maintenance was a contributory cause of the accident.
The defense's move is clearly aimed at obtaining a review of the trial, which ended in 2023 with a definitive 9-year sentence for Lametta alone.
Article published on 27 June 2025 - 20:20
I don't know if what Lametta is doing is right or wrong, but the issue of bus maintenance is certainly very complicated. If the mechanics made a mistake, then there are responsibilities that must be clarified to avoid similar tragedies in the future.