View of the fire that originated in the area of Cerro Alaminos, in Coín, in 2012.GARCÍA SANTOS
On the afternoon of August 30, 2012, a gardener lit a fire in a house in Coín (Málaga) to burn pruning debris.
There were branches of cypresses, oleanders and palm trees.
He stoked the fire several times and then left the place - owned by a foreign citizen who was in his country - without putting it out.
The wind propelled the burning remains and these generated flames that, during the following two days, caused the death of two people and devastated 8,500 hectares of five other municipalities on the Costa del Sol. The prosecution asks for seven and a half years for the gardener for two crimes of reckless homicide and another of injuries due to recklessness.
But, nearly a decade after the event, he has not yet been tried.
His celebration is scheduled for January 2023.
It is an example of the complexity of the investigations and the slowness of the Spanish justice in cases like this.
And a warning about what can happen with the fires that have burned some 200,000 hectares in Spain so far this year.
The account of the Malaga Environment Prosecutor, Fernando Benítez, makes it clear that the investigation rarely delays the trial of these cases.
Both the Environment brigades and the agents of the Nature Protection Service (Seprona) usually finish their work soon, pointing to the root causes.
The difficult part is proving it given the complexity of finding conclusive evidence.
The narration of the 2012 fire is the result of this work by the investigators and allows the prosecutor to affirm that the alleged perpetrator lit the fire "absolutely irresponsibly" and without authorization, which jumped into forest land and advanced through the municipal terms of Mijas, Marbella, Monda and Alhaurin el Grande.
Also Ojén, whose 4,000 inhabitants were evicted.
Two people died – one of them because she did not want to leave her home when she was asked to vacate it – and four others were injured by flames that went out on September 4.
The damage caused exceeded 20 million euros.
Public spending involved an investment of 1.3 million euros: 43 helicopters and planes, 27 vehicles, more than 500 specialists and 400 members of the Emergency Military Unit (UME) participated.
View of the fire that originated in the area of Cerro Alaminos, in Coín, in 2012.GARCÍA SANTOS
What happened to delay the trial so long?
The main problem is the lack of resources.
The case has been taken in the court of Coín (23,375 inhabitants), where they cannot cope.
The Junta de Andalucía incorporated a reinforcement official for the case, but not a judge.
And those that have existed during these years —it is a court with great mobility— have not been able to assume the burden that the process implies.
That is why it bothered judges, investigators and prosecutors so much that the president of the Andalusian Government, Juan Manuel Moreno, asked a few weeks ago —in the midst of the electoral campaign— speed in the investigations.
"The competence to increase resources is precisely your Administration, so the solution is in your hands," say legal sources, who extend the complaint to the rest of the communities.
old claim
The lack of resources is an old demand that is repeated in the reports of the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia, in the reports of the Ombudsman or in those of the unions.
The dean of the courts of Malaga, José María Páez, denounced last spring that the Malaga justice is in "technical bankruptcy" and that 27 units are missing in the province.
Days later, the Minister of Justice, Pilar Llop, stressed that the shortage of courts was a problem throughout the country.
"Our justice system is like a black hole, which absorbs all the work that is put into it and is not effective at all," she said in statements collected by
Malaga today
.
The long delay also has consequences: sentences tend to decrease due to undue delay, that is, because the facts are judged long after they occur.
This is what happened in 2021 in the trial of the two people who caused the historic fire that devastated some 30,000 hectares in the Valencian Community.
The prosecution requested two years and nine months in prison for them, but they stayed at ten months, a sentence that was suspended after a consent agreement.
Another fire in L'Alcalatén (Castellón) took eight years to judge.
The second factor for the delay has been the large number of companies, municipalities, communities or people affected, something common in large forest fires.
Throughout the 8,500 hectares that the fire burned, from Coín to Marbella, almost 350 people were affected.
Notifications and communications with everyone —many are foreign residents— have been complex and have slowed down times.
So has a third factor, again administrative.
The company that made the appraisals to assess the losses of each injured party, Tinsa, had its contract with the Junta de Andalucía run out when the expert report was almost finished.
The new winning company had to repeat the work, accumulating a new delay.
“A lot of damage had to be assessed,” underlines Benítez.
View of the fire in the area of Cerro Alaminos, in Coín, in 2012.
Other large fires in Malaga are already accumulating on the researchers' table.
The main one devastated almost 10,000 hectares and caused the death of a firefighter at the end of last summer in Sierra Bermeja.
Without detainees, the case seemed on track when the Andalusian president said that heaps of pineapples had been found that determined that the fire had been caused, something that bothered the investigators because of the leak and because it turned out to be a false lead.
Another fire burned 3,500 hectares almost two months ago at the La Resinera farm, in the same area.
Four people were arrested, but the Environment brigade continues with it, since there are doubts about the exact origin of the fire, although Seprona does have a clearer idea of its investigation.
Finally, the recent fire in the Sierra de Mijas —2.
000 hectares burned—continues in investigation without, for the time being, having been arrested.
"Let's let them work," says the prosecutor from Malaga.
50% off
Subscribe to continue reading
read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber