United Kingdom: three years after the death of two 8-year-old girls in an accident, a driver charged

The accident caused great emotion in the United Kingdom. British police announced on Friday that they had charged the driver of a vehicle which hit a school in 2023 in Wimbledon, killing two little girls, after reopening the initial contested investigation into the tragedy.

The initial decision, taken in June 2024, not to launch proceedings against the driver, Claire Freemantle, 49, had sparked criticism from the victims’ families over the progress of the investigations.

After a review of the investigation, the prosecutor’s office authorized the police to charge him with two counts of “involuntary manslaughter by dangerous driving” and seven counts of “unintentional serious injury by dangerous driving”, the police said in a press release on Friday. The driver’s lawyers have already announced that she will plead not guilty.

The epileptic seizure first retained

The accident occurred on July 6, 2023, a few hours before the school holidays, in a quiet and rather affluent area of ​​Wimbledon, in the southwest of London.

The car, a 4×4 Land Rover, had crashed into the grounds of a private girls’ school, where students were celebrating the arrival of the holidays outside. Two 8-year-old girls – Nuria Sajjad and Selena Lau – were killed and ten people hospitalized.

The driver, from the neighborhood, was arrested for “suspicion of dangerous driving resulting in death”. But investigators closed the investigation without launching a prosecution, after attributing the accident to an epileptic seizure which caused Claire Freemantle to lose control of the vehicle.

The charges announced Friday “conclude a new, comprehensive and complex investigation by investigators,” said Commander Charmain Brenyah, head of London’s road and transport police.

Complaints against several police officers

This new investigation “identified a certain number of problems during the first investigation”, specifies the police in its press release.

“From the beginning, we have only asked for one thing: the truth about why our daughters died,” the families of Nuria and Selena told the BBC.

At the same time, the police (IOPC) is investigating the progress of the first investigations, in particular to determine “whether the treatment reserved for these people (the families of the victims, editor’s note) by the agents could have been influenced by their ethnic origin”, indicated mid-April the director of the IOPC, Amanda Rowe. Complaints target eleven agents, some of whom have been put on notice for “misconduct” or “serious misconduct”.