By IANS/EFE,
Santiago : Chile’s Supreme Court upheld Monday a verdict ordering a newspaper to pay damages to 13 people hurt in explosions that resulted from preparing fritters according to a recipe they found in the daily.
La Tercera, published by Copesa, must pay a total of 85 million pesos ($163,460) to the 13 victims.
The claims of two other plaintiffs’ were rejected.
The case dates back to July 25, 2004, when La Tercera published in its women’s supplement a recipe for caramel-filled fritters that called for frying a mass of dough at a temperature of 250 degrees Celsius.
The procedure set down in the recipe produced “explosions so violent that the splatters reached the ceiling and bathed the person preparing it”, investigating magistrate Ximena Diaz concluded in 2008 after a four-year investigation.
“Faithfully following the recipe published in the daily, it would be impossible to have avoided this damage,” the judge wrote, noting that La Tercera’s instructions were wrong on the quantities of ingredients to be used.
People who used the recipe suffered burns to the arms, face and chest.
The individual plaintiffs will receive damages ranging from 1 million to 25 million pesos ($1,923 to $48,076).