Italian court partly blames victims for their death in earthquake

New Delhi, Oct 13: An Italian court has in its order partly blamed the victims of the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake for their own deaths. The court in the ruling reportedly said that the compensation for the victim's relatives should be reduced.

The 6.3 magnitude earthquake occurred on April 6, 2009, in which 309 were killed. The earthquake was followed by tremors across the rugged Abruzzo region in central Italy, reported the news agency AFP.

The judge, in a civil suit for millions of euros in damages, said that the victims had gone back to bed despite two tremors earlier in the night, according to the news agency. The suit was presented by the relatives of 24 people who died in one of the buildings in the ruling.

That judge even said that their rash behaviour made them 30 per cent responsible for their deaths, AFP reported citing the Italian newspaper Messaggero daily.

A lawyer who is also a mother of a victim, a 25-year-old student who died, said the ruling was absurd considering experts had played down fears of a killer quake.

The earthquake which reduced L'Aquila's elegant medieval, Renaissance and Baroque squares and buildings to rubble, left 1,600 people injured and at least 80,000 people homeless.