Travel  |  Business World  |  Women's World  |  Entertainment

Change Your Life!

Criminal investigation opened into fatal mudslide

News
Sports
Chat
Travel
Dhaka Today
Yellow Pages
Higher Education
Ask a Doctor
Weather
Currency Rate
Horoscope
E-Cards
B2K Poll
Comment on the Site
B2K Club

January 17, 2001 

SION, Switzerland-- (AP) - Authorities in southern Switzerland have started an investigation of possible negligent homicide in a mudslide that killed three people.

Investigating magistrate Jacques de Lavallaz on Tuesday confirmed a report in the daily Le Temps that he had started a formal criminal investigation into what caused a high-pressure water main to burst high in the Alps, sending mud barreling downhill for almost a mile (half a kilometer).

The Dec. 12 slide buried farm buildings and chalets. The bodies of three people swept away by the torrent have never been found.

The main, which ran 100 meters (328 feet) under the ground, was part of the pressurized pipe system of a hydroelectric power plant 1,240 meters (4,000 feet) above sea level.

Mountain guides who checked the concrete-encased steel main after the mudslide found a nine-meter (29 1/2-foot) fissure.