Murder charges may be a possible outcome of an inquiry into construction safety in the wake of the April 6 earthquake, L'Aquila Public Prosecutor Alfredo Rossini said Friday.
Rossini earlier this week promised the ''mother of all inquiries'' after many modern, supposedly quake-proof buildings collapsed in the devastating earthquake that killed 294 people.
''We have to see if anyone involved in the chain of building the houses that collapsed contributed to the deaths caused... by the earthquake,'' he said Friday.
''If someone made a mistake, then the crime is without intent, but if someone behaved like a thief and didn't put the iron in the pillars, then it becomes a crime with intent,'' he said.
Rossini said prosecutors had seized 13 buildings as part of the inquiry, although ''there will be others'', and that he had drawn up a list of around 20 people to be questioned.
''The questioning will begin once we have got all the documentation useful for reconstructing the 'lives' of these buildings and when results from surveys of the seized properties are available,'' he said.
Prosecutors were also collecting footage from local television stations from immediately after the quake as well as from closed circuit cameras outside banks and other city buildings to form a picture of how buildings collapsed.
Survivors of the quake meanwhile continued to lodge complaints, many of whom described the damage to their properties as ''absolutely inexplicable''.
Around 80 students who lived in the Student Lodgings that was destroyed in the quake, killing seven under the rubble, formed a committee to lodge a joint complaint.
''I decided to join to have justice. There were lots of things wrong with the building but they were taken lightly,'' said student Marilena Faragasso, who scrambled to safety from the lodgings on April 6 helped by a group of others.
In another complaint, a survivor said he had bought his house three months prior to the quake.
''They assured me it was quake-proof, and instead it collapsed. That was my life's savings,'' he said.
Earlier this week Rossini said the city's San Salvatore hospital would be ''one of the main points'' of the inquiry.
The hospital, which opened in 2000 and should have been quake-proof, had to be evacuated after its walls cracked.
