Crowd Riots as Spain’s Tainted Oil Case Opens

An enraged crowd yelling “Murderess!” and “Hag!” chased the only woman among 38 people charged with causing history’s largest mass food poisoning at the end of today’s opening session of Spain’s trial of the century.

The hundreds of protesters, many of them victims of the 1981 cooking oil poisoning, also hurled bottles of toxic oil and rocks at two more defendants when they emerged from a makeshift courthouse.

The violence erupted at the end of the first session of the trial of the 38 accused in the poisoning that killed nearly 600 people and injured almost 25,000 who believed they were buying olive oil.

Lengthy Trial Expected

The trial is expected to last at least five months.

About 1,000 people, most of them los afectados, or the affected ones, gathered outside the courtroom before the trial opened, chanting “murderers, murderers” and waving banners demanding “Justice and Punishment for the Guilty.”

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--586 counts of manslaughter and 24,613 of serious injury.

Not for Consumption

The alleged mastermind of the swindle, Juan Miguel Bengoechea, told the court he had no idea the 600 tons of rapeseed oil he imported from France would be used for human consumption.

But 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 pure olive oil in the spring of 1981.

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