Food Poison Trial in Spain Sparks Anger

MADRID —  An enraged crowd yelling “Murderers, murderers!” hurled stones and other objects Monday at some of the 38 defendants charged with causing one of history’s largest mass food poisoning.

The hundreds of protesters, most of them victims or relatives of victims of the 1981 cooking oil poisoning that killed about 600 people, waved banners demanding “justice and punishment of the guilty” on the first day of what is being called Spain’s trial of the century.

About 1,000 people, most of them los afectados-- the affected ones--had gathered outside the courtroom before the trial opened. Riot squads and mounted police held back the crowd, although 300 later were allowed in the courtroom where the accused sat impassively in a bulletproof dock as the prosecution’s case was read to them--584 counts of manslaughter and 24,613 of serious injury.

Prosecutors put the number of deaths at 584. The Health Ministry number is 356, and figures from other sources range up to 650.

Compensation Demanded

Compensation equivalent to millions of dollars is being demanded for the deaths and for injuries. There is little chance the defendants could pay, since their total worth amounts to less than 1% of the total damages asked.

Some defendants spent years in jail awaiting trial, but all now are out on bail. The government has impounded their businesses, homes and assets.

The alleged mastermind of the swindle in which toxic industrial oil was passed off as pure olive oil, Juan Miguel Bengoechea, told the court he had no idea that the 600 tons of rapeseed oil he imported from France would be used for human consumption.

The prosecution alleges that the oil, which had been treated with aniline dyes to mark it for industrial use only, was knowingly put on sale as olive oil in the spring of 1981.

Door-to-door salesmen and market peddlers hawked the five-liter plastic bottles as olive oil in Madrid’s industrial neighborhoods and in villages in central Spain.

The first death reported was that of an 8-year-old boy on May 6, 1981. Other members of his family fell ill.

The survivors continue to suffer ills ranging from paralysis and crippled muscles to wasting diseases and psychiatric disorders.

After the opening session, the crowd chased Adela Jarauta, the only woman indicted, as she fled down the street and took refuge in a fenced-in parking lot where police formed a cordon to protect her.

The pursuing demonstrators screamed “Murderess!” and “Hag!” and chanted, “String the murderess up!”

250,000-Page Dossier

Forty people were indicted in the case but only 38 are in custody. The two others fled while free on bail and are being tried in absentia.

The prosecution has amassed a 250,000-page dossier on the illnesses. It bases its case largely on findings by the World Health Organization that adulterated cooking oil was “beyond a doubt” the cause of the poisonings.

But research in laboratories in Canada, the United States, Britain and Spain has failed to identify the exact toxin.

The failure to pin down the killer agent gives defense lawyers their key argument--that cooking oil was not the cause of the food poisoning.

Prosecutor Eduardo Fungairino is seeking jail sentences totaling more than 106,000 years for each of the eight alleged ringleaders, though the maximum they could spend in prison if convicted is 30 years. Spain has no death penalty.

The Spanish press has dubbed the case the “trial of the century.” Officials converted the fairground auditorium on Madrid’s west side to accommodate about 600 reporters, 89 lawyers and hundreds of victims expected to attend the trial.

Many in the crowd Monday cried in chorus, “We don’t want bread, we don’t want wine, we want to see them hang from a pine.”

One of the demonstrators, Victor Sanchez Gimeniz, 44, said, “We want the truth. And if they’re guilty, let them die the way many of us did, slowly and painfully.”