MADRID -- Hundreds of people, some crippled and maimed by history's largest mass food poisoning, hurled rocks and chanted 'Murderers! Murderers!' outside the courthouse where 38 people went on trial Monday on charges of selling the tainted cooking oil that unleashed the illness.
Forty people, mostly industrial oil importers and cooking oil wholesalers, were indicted. Two who fled Spain are being tried in absentia. The trial is expected to last at least five months.
Most of Monday's protesters were victims of the 'toxic oil syndrome,' which has killed nearly 600 people and affected almost 25,000 others since it erupted in the spring of 1981.
Anger flared Monday as nearly 1,000 victims gathered outside an auditorium converted to a courtroom for what the Spanish press has called the 'trial of the century.'
The demonstrators held at bay by riot squads and mounted police repeatedly broke into shouts of 'Murderers! Murderers!' and chanted, 'We don't want bread, we don't want wine, we want to see them hang from a pine.'
Some hurled bottles of the toxic oil and rocks at two of the defendants who emerged for a lunchtime recess.
The protesters represented thousands of survivors -- known as 'los afectados,' Spanish for the affected ones -- who still suffer ills ranging from paralysis and crippled muscles to severe psychiatric disorders.
At the midday recess, several hundred of them yelled 'hag' and 'string the murderess up' as they chased a female defendant down a sidewalk. Her lawyer was was slightly injured by rocks.
Outside the courthouse, a woman held up her granddaughter, 7-year-old Almudena Carretero, gaunt and hollow-eyed from the effects of the poisoning.
'We don't want money. We want a cure,' the grandmother said. Like many of the crowd, she had traveled by bus from a distant village to attend the trial only to be turned away by police. Eventually about 300 victims were allowed to enter the court.
The 38 defendants sat impassively in a bullet-proof dock as they listened to the prosecution tell the court they knowingly sold rapeseed oil laced with aniline dye to mark it for industrial use and unfit for human consumption.
The accused ringleader, importer Juan Miguel Bengoechea, replied that he had 'no idea' that the 600 tons of oil he purchased in France had been refined by wholesale dealers to make it resemble cooking oil.
'If I had known it, I would not have sold it,' he said. To many of the questions put to him by state prosecutor Eduardo Fungairino, he answered 'I do not remember,' prompting murmurs of protest among the victims.
The prosecution is seeking prison sentences of more than 106,000 years for Bengoechea and seven others accused of organizing the scheme. But under Spanish law the maximum time they could spend behind bars is 30 years.
Charges include 584 counts of manslaughter and 24,992 of serious injury.
Most victims came from working-class families who bought the oil in gallon plastic bottles from door-to-door salesmen who hawked it as pure olive oil.
The prosecution, which has amassed a 250,000-page dossier on the syndrome, bases its case largely on findings by the World Health Organization that the adulterated oil was 'beyond a doubt' the cause of the poisonings.
Because the exact toxin or toxins were not identified, however, defense lawyers were expected to argue that cooking oil was not the cause of what the Guinness Book of Records calls the world's largest mass food poisoning.
One demonstrator, 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.'
