Last update - 00:00 17/12/2006
Four convicted of 23 negligent deaths in Versailles wedding disaster
By Nir Hasson, Haaretz Correspondent, and Haaretz Service
Jerusalem District Court on Sunday convicted four engineers of the negligent deaths of 23 people in the May 2001 collapse of the Versailles wedding hall in Jerusalem.
More than 350 people were also injured when the floor of the events hall, on the third floor of a four-story building, gave way and guests at the wedding of Keren and Asaf Dror plunged through a massive hole that appeared.
The developer of the "Pal Kal" method of construction, Eli Ron, and engineers Uri Pesach, Dan Shefer and Shimon Kaufman were also convicted of negligent assault and injuring 356 people.
Building contractor Yaakov Adir, who built the hall, was not convicted of negligent death, but was found guilty of acting negligently.
The court ruled that it has been proven that the "Pal-Kal" system is substandard and dangerous, and that Eli Ron was negligent in distributing and selling it.
The court also ruled that Ron had persisted with the system despite warnings of intrinsic flaws.
"A reasonable man in Ron's place could and should have been aware of these flaws and the danger in the Pal-Kal system," wrote Judge Moshe Gal.
In October 2004, the three owners of Versailles, Adi Avraham, Efraim Adiv and Uri Nissim, were convicted for their roles in the disaster.
Adi Avraham and Ephraim Adiv were convicted of negligent homicide and received two-and-a-half year jail terms and four months suspended sentence. Uri Nissim was given four months' public service and a four-month suspended sentence.
Nissim received a lighter sentence than the others because, unlike them, he was not directly involved in the day-to-day management of the hall, and because of his ill health.
In the verdict, the court determined that "the defendants, for whom the safety of the public using their hall should have been paramount, should have called in an engineer to evaluate the depression in the floor and the measures needed to correct it. Not having done so, they were negligent."