Spanish judge names Dragados site manager a suspect in footbridge collapse that killed six

The court order, made public on Nov. 3 and reported by Demócrata and elDiario.es, says the site manager must answer for allegedly negligent work in building the footbridge in a way that departed from the approved project. In the judge's view, that deviation may have weakened the structure and could have played a part in the failure. In Spain, being named “investigado” means formal criminal investigation. It is not a charge, and nobody has been tried.

The judge wrote that the site manager was responsible for the physical execution of the span. In that role, she said, he should have caught significant departures from the drawings, pushed to fix them and reported any change affecting the structure to the project's technical direction. The court will examine whether he approved or accepted a different construction method, and whether he failed his duty to supervise and warn. He first testified in June as an expert witness. The move against him followed testimony from Dragados's legal representative in September and from two other company employees on Oct. 30.

He is the eighth person under investigation. The others are the 112 dispatcher who took a neighbor's warning call the day before the collapse, the local police officer who got that alert, the head of the coastal authority (Demarcación de Costas) in Cantabria, two officials who ran its projects service, the Fronda engineer who signed the design and the Dragados representative. That representative told the court the span, built in 2024, followed Fronda's specifications, was built in two pieces instead of one and that this did not affect its safety, Europa Press reported via Infobae.

The site manager is due in court on Nov. 20. Infobae reported the investigation could close around the turn of the year. Santander city hall, Costas and Dragados face possible civil liability.