Stages continue to burn pending the trial of the Iqoxe case, the judicial investigation opened by criminal proceedings after the deadly explosion at the Tarragona petrochemical company, on January 14, 2020. Two plant workers and a resident of the Torreforta neighborhood died who was quietly in his apartment 2.5 kilometers from the deflagration.
The judge closed the long and complex investigation in mid-June, three and a half years after the accident, prosecuting three former Iqoxe executives for gross negligence resulting in death. The Tarragona City Council yesterday became the first of the private accusations to move a file, and presented the indictment before the investigative court No. 1 of Tarragona, as announced by the Diari de Tarragona, with a request for penalties that add up globally 25 years in prison for three senior Iqoxe officials on the day of the terrible accident. This is the worst accident in the history of the Tarragona petrochemical company. It also requests a fine of nine million euros for the company.
The penalty requests are in line with the path taken so far by the magistrate in the Iqoxe case, who has decided to prosecute the same executive leadership for three crimes of manslaughter for serious negligence, in addition to accusing the company. Specifically, the Tarragona City Council requests the highest sentence, ten years in prison, for José Luis Morlanes, at that time general director of Iqoxe and one of the souls of the Spanish chemical company.
For Juan Manuel Rodríguez Prats, who was the director of the affected plant in the south chemical estate of Tarragona, in La Canonja (Tarragonès), the City Council requests eight years and nine months in prison. For the former head of security, Gerard Adrio, the request for a sentence is six years and nine months.
The three are accused of three crimes of manslaughter for serious recklessness and havoc and a crime against industrial security. For the directors, the private accusation exercised by the Consistory requests a disqualification of 50 years and a fine of 358,000 euros.
At the center of the accusation is Morlanes, no longer responsible for the company. The City Council maintains that as general director it imposed a cost reduction policy, without investing as it should in security. The consequence, according to the prosecution's thesis, was that the safety of the Iqoxe workers was seriously weakened –two died as a result of the deflagration– and of the residents themselves. Their homes suffered serious damage, to the point that one of them lost his life despite being inside his home that afternoon. A fragment of the reactor flew almost three kilometers and hit his house.
Although the judge closed the case in mid-June, prosecuting the Iqoxe leadership, leaving the defendants one pass away from sitting on the bench, the trial will still take time to arrive. The president of the Provincial Court of Tarragona, Joan Perarnau, warned at the beginning of the summer that the trial will not take place before two years, in 2025.
The reason for so much delay, with the judicial investigation already completed in a case of enormous impact and social alarm, that it is an instruction that legally has an "ordinary preference". The fact that three people died in the explosion does not have any legal weight to speed up the trial date, nor does the serious damage outside the chemical park, with pieces of the damaged reactor flying within a radius of almost three kilometers, which generated enormous mistrust. between the population and the chemical industry. Yes, it would make it necessary to give priority to the trial if there was someone in pretrial detention. None of the accused has spent a single day in prison.
