US mechanic is found guilty of causing Paris Concorde crash

An American aviation mechanic has been found guilty of killing the 113 people who died in the Concorde disaster more than 10 years ago.

John Taylor, 42, was responsible for the "involuntary manslaughter" of the victims alongside his employer Continental Airlines, a Paris court ruled today after a four-month trial.

He was given a 15-month suspended sentence and a 2,000 (£1,700) fine, while the airline was fined 200,000 after it was found "criminally responsible" for the crash in July 2000.

But judges found that none of the French citizens facing charges was culpable, leading to accusations that the trial was politically motivated to exonerate France of any responsibility.

Christiane Marty, the widow of the Concorde pilot, Christian, heard the verdict read out at Pontoise Correctional Court, north of Paris and a few miles from the scene of the horrific accident, which ended the era of supersonic travel.

Concorde flights were suspended for 16 months after the crash, before Air France and British Airways grounded them for good in 2003.

The Air France Concorde was full of German tourists when it caught fire during take-off from Charles de Gaulle airport and crashed into a hotel.

The judges ruled that a 17-inch titanium stripe from a Continental DC-10 caused the disaster after it fell on the runway, puncturing a tyre on the Concorde. Debris from the tyre pierced Concorde's fuel tanks, triggering a huge explosion.

This made Continental guilty of "involuntary manslaughter" because of poor maintenance by its engineers, according to the verdict.

A four-month trial ended in May with several people facing manslaughter charges after a decade-long investigation which produced 80,000 pages of evidence. Prosecutors wanted a two-year suspended prison sentence for Henri Perrier, 81, dubbed "the Father of Concorde", who ran Concorde's testing programme between 1978 and 1994, but he was cleared.

Two more Frenchmen, engineer Jacques Herubel, and Claude Frantzen, former head of French civil aviation, were charged but have since been cleared.

Continental's defence team had pointed out that Concorde's tyres frequently exploded during its 27-year history, with flying debris piercing the fuel tank at least once before. This design fault should, they argued, have been fixed.

Air France, which has been cleared of all blame, has paid out millions in compensation to the families of victims, and is now suing Continental in a civil case.