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Rainer Schallerthe German tycoon founder of the McFit gym chain and head of the company that organized it Love parade of 2010 in which he died there Giulia Minola from Bresciahas been missing since Friday evening after a plane crash.
Schaller was traveling with his family on a touring aircraft that departed from Mexico, that is crashed into the Caribbean Sea off Costa Rica. In addition to the 53-year-old millionaire businessman, his 44-year-old companion, his two minor children, the 66-year-old Swiss pilot and a 40-year-old sixth passenger were on board the plane. For now, the bodies of an adult and a child have been found, not yet identified.
Rainer Schaller had also been head of the Lopaventorganizer of the Loveparade, the dance music festival, between 2006 and 2010, the year of the massacre in Duisburg, Germany, in which twenty-one people died including the 21-year-old from Brescia Giulia Minola. The tycoon was never directly involved in the investigation, which the May 4, 2020 was archived by the Duisburg Tribunal with three remaining defendants, accused of manslaughter and bodily harm.
The Love Parade of 2010
Giulia Minola, the 21-year-old from Brescia who died during the 2010 Loveparade
On July 24, 2010, 21 people died during the rally crushed in the crowd. The victims came from Germany, China, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands and Italy. Among them was Giulia Minola from Brescia, 21, a fashion and design student at the Milan Polytechnic, who had made a stop in Duisburg during a trip to Europe with a friend of hers.
According to the prosecution at the trial that began in Düsseldorf on 8 December 2017, the massacre was to be attributed to shortcomings in the organization and management of the event. The party area, a former railway yard bordered by tracks and a highway, could only be reached through a tunnel with a single access, also used as an exit route. In the afternoon the audience met stuck in the tunnel, with a particularly dangerous funnel at the access ramp to the rally. The police tried to manage the situation by creating cordons to ease the pressure of the crowd, to no avail. On the ramp, people entering and exiting ended up colliding. In messy escape and out of control hundreds of people were crushed. In addition to the 21 deaths, there were 650 injured.
The process
The esplanade of the Loveparade in Duisburg
The investigation lasted four years. In 2016, the court rejected the indictment of the Duisburg Public Prosecutor’s Office prepared two years earlier for lack of sufficiently strong evidence. After the opposition of the Prosecutor’s Office and the families of the victims, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision of the judges and set the trial for December 8, 2017. The defendants were all employees of Lopavent, with officials and employees of the City of Duisburg.
Among the great excluded were the policewhich according to the reconstructions had instead a role in the chain of errors of the management of the event, as well as the former mayor of Duisburg Adolf Sauerlandwho resigned one year after the massacre due to pressure from citizens, e Rainer Schaller, the number one of the Lopavent. In May 2018 Schaller appeared in the courtroom in Düsseldorf, the site of the trial, and said: “All the suffering you experienced in Duisburg happened at my party. I take moral responsibility for all of this“. However, on that occasion he reiterated that he did not feel guilty and that he had not participated in the concrete choices on the preparation and management of the Loveparade.
McFit in Piazza Vittoria
In 2019 in the spaces of the former Standa in Piazza Vittoria has McFit chain gym opened, which at the time of the Loveparade in 2010 was the main sponsor of the event conceived as a showcase for gyms spread throughout Germany and in various countries abroad, including Italy. Giulia Minola’s mother, Nadia Zanacchi, commented: «With deep disturbance we witness the inauguration of a McFit gym. Name that for us is equivalent to Loveparade, the tragedy of 2010 in which 21 boys lost their lives. Among them our daughter ».
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