A dad has been cleared of manslaughter after his five-year-old son fatally hit an 87-year-old woman while learning how to ride a .

The pensioner was walking with a stick accompanied by a 74-year-old friend in a park in when she was knocked into by the , causing her to lose her balance. She hit her head in the fall, and later died from the injuries. The father of the boy, who did not have stabilisers on his small bike, was later investigated for . He has now been cleared, after the judge found he would not have been able to act in time to prevent the accident from happening.

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According to Italian news agency ANSA, the boy "lost control of the bike" and hit the elderly woman "at a moderate speed. While the accident did not at first appear to be serious, the father insisted on calling an ambulance, and the woman lost consciousness on the way to hospital. She was given emergency treatment upon arrival, but was pronounced dead by doctors a short time later.

Prosecutors later brought a criminal liability case against the child's father, citing Italian manslaughter law which states that "not preventing an event" which "one has the legal obligation to prevent" is "equivalent to causing it". If found liable he could have been forced to pay around €200,000 (£160,000) in compensation, unless he could prove he was "unable to prevent the act". According to Italian media, the prosecution team argued that dad had not "adequately supervised the child's activity", creating an "intrinsically dangerous" situation by placing a potentially dangerous vehicle "in the hands of a person incapable of adapting its use to the conditions of the place".

However, this week investigating judge Luigi Iannelli in Milan found the minor collision and its impacts could not have been predicted, and ruled that father would not have been able to react quickly enough to stop it from happening. He was cleared of criminal liability.

Italian prosecutors are known for being proactive in establishing potential criminal liability upon a person's death. Last month, a priest became the subject of a manslaughter probe after a newborn baby left outside his church died. Father Antonio Ruccia, a Roman Catholic priest at the San Giovanni Battista Church in the southern Italian city of Bari, was named as a suspect in the case, despite not being at the church at the time.