US airline Continental and one of its mechanics were today convicted of causing the Air France Concorde crash that killed 113 people 10 years ago.

The airline was ordered to pay Air France £914,000 for damaging its reputation, and fined £170,000.

The presiding judge ruled Continental and its employee were guilty of criminal negligence, confirming investigators' long-held belief that titanium debris dropped by a Continental DC-10 onto the runway at Charles de Gaulle airport was to blame.

The debris cut the Concorde's tyre, propelling bits of rubber into the fuel tanks and starting a fire.

The plane then slammed into a nearby hotel, killing all 109 people aboard and four others on the ground. Most of the victims were German tourists.

Ronald Schmid, a lawyer who has represented several of their families , said he was "sceptical" about the ruling.

"It bothers me that none of those responsible for Air France were sitting in the docks," he said.

The airline and mechanic John Taylor were also ordered to jointly pay more than £230,000 in damages to different civil parties.

Taylor was also given a 15-month suspended prison sentence, and a £1,700 fine. All other defendants - including three former French officials and Taylor's now-retired supervisor Stanley Ford - were acquitted.

The court said Taylor should not have used titanium, a harder metal than usual, to build the wear strip that fell off the DC-10. He was also accused of improperly installing the piece that fell onto the runway on July 25, 2000,.

Continental's lawyer, Olivier Metzner, confirmed the airline would appeal. He denounced a ruling that he called "patriotic" for sparing the French defendants and convicting only the Americans.

"This is a ruling that protects only the interests of France. This has strayed far from the truth of law and justice," he said. "This has privileged purely national interests.

A Continental spokesman said the airline disagreed with the "absurd finding" against it and Taylor.

"Portraying the metal strip as the cause of the accident and Continental and one of its employees as the sole guilty parties shows the determination of the French authorities to shift attention and blame away from Air France," he said, noting that Air France was state-run at the time.

Roland Rappaport, a lawyer for the family of Concorde pilot Christian Marty and a pilots' union, said the verdict was "incomprehensible" and asked why blame was heaped on Continental mechanics when French officials were aware of weaknesses on the Concorde around 20 years before the crash.

"This trial made clear that the Concorde, this superb plane, suffered from severe technical insufficiencies, problems with the fuel tanks that were known since '79," he said outside the courtroom.

The prosecution also requested a two-year suspended sentence for Henri Perrier, former head of the Concorde programme at plane maker Aerospatiale. It argued for acquitting French engineer Jacques Herubel and Claude Frantzen, former chief of France's civil aviation authority.

While France's aviation authority concluded the crash could not have been foreseen, a judicial inquiry said the plane's fuel tanks lacked sufficient protection from shock and said officials had known about the problem for more than 20 years.

The families of most victims were compensated years ago, so financial claims were not the trial's focus - the main goal was to assign responsibility. It is not uncommon for such cases to take years to reach trial in France.

In France, unlike in many other countries, plane crashes routinely lead to trials to assign criminal responsibility. It is common for cases to drag on for years.

In 2009, France's highest court finally confirmed the acquittal of all those originally accused of responsibility in an Air Inter crash that killed 87 people in 1992 - 17 years earlier.

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