Six guilty in Swiss canyon deaths

Rescuers search for survivors following the 1999 tragedy

INTERLAKEN, Switzerland -- A judge has found six people guilty of negligent manslaughter in the deaths of 21 people in a 1999 Alpine flash flood.

The six -- employees and managers of a now-defunct adventure company -- were given suspended prison sentences.

Judge Thomas Zbinden, who presided over the seven-day trial without a jury, said they were guilty of allowing a canyoning trip to proceed despite bad weather.

Eighteen tourists and three guides drowned when they were swept away on the Saxet Brook, above Interlaken, following a thunderstorm on July 27, 1999.

Two surviving guides were found not guilty. The judge said it was not their responsibility to cancel the trip.

But Zbinden said the three directors of Adventure World -- Stephan Friedli, Peter Balmer and Georg Hoedle -- were guity because they had not ordered a risk analysis and had not banned canyoning during storms.

The three were each given five-month suspended prison sentences and fines of 7,500 Swiss francs ($4,500).

Three senior guides based at the company's headquarters were found guilty of not stopping the trip despite the weather conditions. They were given slightly lesser sentences and fines.

They all had faced up to a year in prison.

"Safety is, and remains, the most important thing for a company like Adventure World," Zbinden said. "The responsibility for this lies with the board of directors, and so it did in 1999."

The defendants, along with friends and family of the victims from Australia, Britain and South Africa, sat quietly as Zbinden read out the verdict.

All the defendants denied the charges, saying the flash flood was entirely unforeseeable.

During the trial, a survivor of the trip described how she and her friends were swept away in a wall of water "as high as the canyon."

"We had probably two seconds to react," said accountant Rachel O'Brien, who came to the court from Australia to testify.

As the group walked to the start of the trip, it was "pouring with rain" and there was thunder, she said. It continued to rain as they started the canyoning. "The water had risen quite significantly and had changed to a very dark brown."

An hour into the trip, as her team prepared to jump from a ledge into the water below, they were alerted by the scream of a member of the group.

"We all turned behind us and we saw the wave of water which would have been as high as the canyon coming toward us," she told the judge.

"The guides told us to hold on to something. There was a rope going into the water for the jump. We grasped on to that. Then the water hit and the force pushed all of the first people off on to us and then slowly I lost grip of the rope."

O'Brien said she was swept away but managed to grab on to a stone and pull herself out of the water. She had to wait there for an hour before she was winched to safety by a rescue helicopter.

Earlier in the trial, defendant Friedli told the court that the tragedy was "unforeseeable and unavoidable."

"I am not conscious of having made a mistake," he said.

Canyoning is similar to white-water rafting, but without the raft. Participants wear padded wet suits and slide down rocky fast-flowing rivers.

In 2000, two Adventure World employees were given five-month suspended sentences for the negligent manslaughter of a 22-year-old American who died when he slammed into the ground during a bungee jump with a cord that was too long.

That accident forced Adventure World to close down. Switzerland later adopted a code of conduct for commercial extreme sports operators.