By Kevin Done in London

Continental Airlines and five individuals have been ordered to stand trial over the crash of an Air France Concorde near Paris that killed 113 people in July 2000.

Prosecutors said the defendants would be charged with involuntary manslaughter over the disaster which hastened the demise of the world’s only supersonic commercial jet. Air France and British Airways eventually grounded their Concorde fleets permanently in late 2003.

Debris on the runway at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport from a previous departure by a Continental Airlines DC-10 flight was blamed as a cause of the Concorde crash in the report by French air accident investigators.

The report established that a tyre blow-out shortly before take-off was the main factor in the crash. A piece of metal that had dropped off one of the engines of the DC-10, which departed about four minutes before the Concorde, caused a tyre on the supersonic jet to rupture.

A piece of the exploding rubber slammed into the Concorde fuel tank, causing fuel to gush out. It was quickly ignited and led to a spreading fire, that helped to cut power from two of its engines.

A spokesman for Continental said on Thursday the indictments were “outrageous and completely unjustified”.

He said the airline remained “firmly convinced that neither it nor its employees were the cause of the Concorde tragedy”.

Continental will face charges of negligence in its aircraft maintenance, according to a statement from the office of prosecutor Marie-Thérèse de Givry in Pontoise, France.

Two Continental employees face charges of improperly installing the strips of metal on the DC-10 and could face fines of several hundred thousand euros. Higher damages could eventually result from civil cases brought by families of the accident victims.

One of the Continental employees is charged for having made and installed the metal strip used on the DC-10 “without respecting the rules in force”. The second, the engineering supervisor, is charged with having allowed the change of the part and of authorising the return to service.

Continental is charged for allowing the DC-10 to go back into service and for not properly maintaining its DC-10 fleet.

A former French civil aviation official and two former members of the Concorde team at Aerospatiale, the former French aircraft maker, have also been indicted for negligence and under-estimating the risk posed to the aircraft’s airworthiness from accidents involving burst tyres.

Airbus, the successor company of Aerospatiale, refused to comment on the indictments.