27 charged in Panama poisoning

21 December 2010 - 09H21

File photo shows a boy walks past a doctor at a hospital in Panama City. Twenty-seven people have been charged in Panama for the 2006 mass poisoning that left 168 dead due to contaminated medicinal syrup, prosecutors said.

AFP - Twenty seven people have been charged in Panama in the 2006 mass poisoning that left 168 dead due to contaminated medicinal syrup, prosecutors said.

"So far there are 27 defendants," prosecutor Dimas Guevara, who was to make the case before country's supreme court, said Monday.

The medicines, contaminated with diethylene glycol, an industrial solvent used for automobile brake fluid and antifreeze -- and imported from China -- left hundreds sickened.

While authorities acknowledge 168 people dead, a group representing the victims claims the figure is much higher.

"We are fighting for real justice, for this not to happen again anywhere in the world," Gabriel Pascual, head of the victims' group, told AFP.

Up to this point the only person arrested had been the legal representative of Panama's Social Security Fund that distributed the drug.