A group of 15 Romanian and Hungarian skiers might have set off the recent avalanche in the Franch Alps, which killed three people.

This is one of the possibilities the investigators are taking into account after a Romanian skier told the police that he was skiing together with fourteen other people on the slope above the place where the high school students were. According to the Romanian, they might have triggered the avalanche “by cutting the snowpack in that place,” reports Le Figaro.

The investigators are now trying to find the other members of the group, mainly composed of Romanians and Hungarians.

On Wednesday, a group of ten students from the St.-Exupery school in Lyon, together with their teacher, went skiing on a closed slope of the Deux Alps ski resort. An avalanche hit them and killed two of the students and a Ukrainian skier.

The teacher who accompanied the students onto the closed slope in the French Alps is now facing charges of involuntary manslaughter because he took his students to a closed slope.

Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com