A SPANISH medical corps general has been sentenced to three years in jail and two other officers to 18 months each for lying and falsifying the death certificates of 30 members of the Spanish armed forces killed in a plane crash six years ago as they were returning from a humanitarian mission in Afghanistan.
The court also ordered Gen Vicente Navarro to pay €10,000 to the families of each of the victims incorrectly identified. If the Supreme Court confirms the sentences, they will be expelled from the armed forces.
Sixty two people were killed when the chartered Ukrainian Yak-42 crashed into a mountain near Trabzon in Turkey in May 2003. Thirty of the victims were not properly identified.
Federico Trillo, Popular Party defence minister at the time, has refused to take any blame for the accident or for the false identification. Families of the victims claim that he ignored warnings from passengers – some of them airforce officers – on previous military flights from Afghanistan complaining that the chartered planes were unsafe.
Mr Trillo is alleged to have ordered that the remains be returned to Spain, if necessary before autopsies or identification, in order to hold a state funeral attended by King Juan Carlos and the Spanish royal family.
Many of the victims’ families doubted from the beginning that the coffins they received after the funeral actually contained the remains of their own relatives. They formed a families’ association which fought to learn the truth about the accident. After 18 months the courts ordered the exhumation of the bodies for DNA testing which proved their suspicions, and it has taken until this year before the officers were brought to trial.
The association flew in the Turkish forensic experts who had carried out the autopsies and identification examinations to give evidence.
They complained they had been pressured to put names to remains without proper identification because the Spanish wanted to take them back for the funeral.
One of them even alleged that some of the Spanish officers involved in the examination smelled of alcohol.