Engineer convicted for Versailles hall disaster appeals sentence

Engineer Eli Ron, who developed the "PalKal" method of construction used in a Jerusalem banquet hall that collapsed during a 2001 wedding, killing 23 people, appealed his sentence of five years to the Supreme Court on Tuesday in order to have his conviction revoked.

Ron was convicted in December last year, along with three other engineers, of the negligent deaths of the 23 people who died in the May 2001 disaster. The four were also convicted of negligent assault and injuring 356 people.

Halfway through the reception at the wedding of Keren and Asaf Dror, guests plunged through a massive hole appeared in the floor.

At the same time, the State Prosecution also filed an appeal, seeking to repeal Ron's acquittal of manslaughter charges, and harsher penalties on Ron and the other engineers who had been convicted in the affair - Uri Pesach, Dan Shefer and Shimon Kaufman - who were sentenced to 12-30 months in prison.

Ron claims in his appeal that "the District Court ruling is thoroughly deficient, especially in failing to give adequate weight to the blatant contradiction between the state's position that Ron is guilty of developing a method of construction which fails to predict flaws, and its position that the owners of the banquet hall have ignored clear indications that the floor was about to collapse."

On her part, the head of the State Prosecutor's criminal department, Attorney Vered Barzilai, claimed in the appeal that "there were elements of criminal intent that meet the legal requirements of manslaughter charges."

She added that "the court failed to distinguish between Ron's awareness of the possible risk to human life and his assessment of the risk, which is not a prerequisite of criminal intent. Even if he sincerely bought into the engineering concept of PalKal, the court ruling states that he was conscious of the safety risks that it entailed, and therefore his acquittal was unjustified."

	The Versailles wedding hall following the collapse of the third floor. (Uriel Sinai)