San Francisco Frontiers - Five acquitted over deadly 2017 landslide in Swiss Alps

Four German, two Austrian and two Swiss hikers were buried by the landslide in an Alpine valley in southeast Switzerland, close to the Italian border.

The search was called off after two days.

Following an investigation, prosecutors in the Graubunden region charged two cantonal employees, a forest ranger, a local official and a geologist with homicide by negligence.

"The five defendants were acquitted by the Maloja Regional Court," a spokesman for the court in Graubunden told AFP.

In its ruling, the court said there was no evidence of clear warning signs predicting a major natural disaster in the weeks leading up to the massive landslide, reported to the Swiss domestic news agency Keystone-ATS, which covered the trial.

The court also found that the defendants had not acted negligently by failing to close off hiking trails within the danger zone.

The hikers, who were walking in small groups, had set out to hike on the Piz Cengalo mountain, a 3,369-metre high peak in the Bregaglia range.

They were swept away by four million cubic metres of rock that cascaded down the mountain at 250 kilometres per hour, triggering a landslide that destroyed part of the village of Bondo.

Local authorities had posted warnings in the village regarding the danger on the hiking trails due to recent rockfalls.

Thanks to an alert system installed following a previous rockslide in 2011, the authorities managed to evacuate two mountain huts and the hundred or so residents of Bondo before the landslide reached the village.

B.Turner--SFF