A French court handed suspended prison sentences to four people and fined two firms over an accident in 2003 in which 16 people visiting the cruise liner Queen Mary II died when a gangway collapsed.

The accident happened when construction workers and their families crowded on to the gangway during a weekend visit to the luxury liner, which was nearing completion in dockyards in the French port of St Nazaire on the Atlantic coast.

The structure collapsed and people plunged more than 15 metres (45 feet) to the ground. Twenty-nine people were injured.

The court of appeal in Rennes imposed suspended sentences of two years on Fabien Bernal, a manager at the time at Endel, the company that built the faulty gangway, and Etienne Lamock, one of the supervisors in charge of the project at the dockyard.

It imposed 18-month suspended sentences on Loic Chauveau, the designer of the gangway, and Christophe Pierrard, who was in charge of installing it.

All four had been cleared in an earlier trial.

The appeal court also fined the two companies a maximum fine of 225,000 euros ($317,500) each, up from the 177,500 euros imposed by the lower court.

The companies have already been ordered to pay out some 10 million euros in civil suits.

"It's the decision the parties to the case were looking for," Olivier Guibert, a lawyer for a victim who lost both feet in the accident, told reporters. "This type of trial serves to help the grieving process."

Thierry Dalmasso, a lawyer for Endel, said he was bitterly disappointed by the ruling. "These disasters are not the product of a collection of faults by physical individuals but the sum product of a risk environment," he said.

The judge, explaining the sentences, commented on both the number of mistakes that had been made and their "extreme seriousness".

He ruled that a design fault had been the main factor behind the collapse of the gangway, which did not have diagonal bracing on the horizontal slats to ensure greater stability.

The judge also said the gangway had been installed "with no preliminary study, no calculations, no design, no weight details, which led to the absence of bracing".