A guilty verdict for the driver in a 2018 head-on collision in Scotland, which cost the life of a Maltese woman and four others, has left her daughter unmoved, aware the family friend had no intention of killing her mother, who would “never come back”.

The fatal road accident, which also killed the Italian driver’s four-year-old son, devastated the life of Mata Patanè’s family. But Monday’s verdict would “hopefully just mark the closure of a sad chapter”.

The verdict would not bring Frances Saliba back, she told Times of Malta, following the Edinburgh High Court verdict.

Patanè’s mother was killed on her 63rd birthday, during a holiday in Scotland, she said, speaking from Edinburgh, where she was accompanying her father, one of the five Moray crash survivors, at the trial.

On Monday, Alfredo Ciociola, 50, an Italian tourist, was convicted of causing the deaths of five people, including his son, when he drove a minibus onto the wrong side of the road and collided head-on with a car near Keith in the northeast of Scotland.

Edward Reid (left), Audrey Appleby, Evalyn Collie and Frances Saliba died in the crash.

Three passengers in the oncoming car were killed on their return from a dancing event, while its driver, Morag Smith, was seriously injured.

Ciociola’s wife, Concetta Passanisi and Saliba’s husband Francesco Patanè, 74, also sustained serious injuries.

Francesco Patanè had remained conscious throughout and was one of the few survivors who had a memory of the accident.

One of two eyewitnesses, he has spent the last couple of weeks reliving “shocking evidence” from first responders and passers-by on the scene after the collision, who tried to help by smashing the vehicle’s window.

“My father had to return to Edinburgh and reopen the wounds. Four years is a long time for the memory, and it has been stressful,” she said. “For me, it reconstructed what happened and answered many of the questions I had been left with as to exactly what happened in the immediate aftermath of the accident,” said Patanè, who accompanied him to “give him some comfort”.

Ciociola was convicted of causing death by careless driving, having denied the more serious charge of causing death by dangerous driving and that he had fallen asleep behind the wheel, as alleged.

He was remanded in custody and will be sentenced on December 13 in Glasgow.

He did not want to kill them. It was a human error. We recognise it was a moment of confusion- Mata Patanè

'He did not want to kill them'

But the verdict was “neither here nor there” for Patanè. “We are not talking about a killer here. A car is a weapon in anyone’s hands,” she said about the difficult situation where the accused was also an old friend.

“He did not want to kill them. It was a human error,” said the composed daughter.

“He was not used to UK roads and we recognise it was a moment of confusion. We understood his position and the big mistake he made,” said Patanè, 45, who lives in Malta and has been taking care of her father since his wife was killed.

Ciocola has been in prison since he was extradited from Sicily to face trial in Scotland on May 6, having not appeared in court “due to COVID-19 and because his wife had also been seriously injured”, she said.

Patanè maintained the jury’s decision on careless – as opposed to dangerous – driving would have a mitigating effect on the sentence.

“We have never said we want this or that sentence for him. We just left everything to the jury’s decision and in the hands of the investigators,” she said, acknowledging, however, that the only survivor of the other car, Smith, probably had a different view.

BBC News reported her saying in a statement that she believed Ciocola deserved jail time. “But even if he is, no length of time behind bars will compare to what we have suffered,” she said, adding that the only positive from the verdict was that she could “finally focus on my recovery, on my grief and on rebuilding some kind of future”.

Frances Saliba and her husband Francesco Patanè.

Patanè recalled the day after the accident on the night between July 26 and 27, 2018, when, through calls to embassies from Malta, she frantically tried to understand whether her mother was still alive after learning that the young son of the family’s friend had died.

It took until the late afternoon of the next day to ascertain this fact and, the following day, she was in Aberdeen for a month until her father was discharged from hospital.

“The accident caused a huge upheaval in our lives… but the verdict is nothing for us. Life now goes on.

“I will just focus on giving my father comfort and a good quality of life. He left behind his country, his house, his friends. He does not speak Maltese or English and I am his only point of reference,” Patanè said.