The methanol affair is the name for a series of poisonings by alcohol in whose production toxic methanol was used. The case broke out in Czechia at the beginning of September 2012. The number of victims reached 48, which makes it the second most serious disaster since the independent Czech state came into being. Only the floods of 1997, in which fifty people lost their lives, claimed more lives.[1]
How the poisonings came about
The first person to die of the poisoning, on 3 September 2012, was a resident of Havířov.[1] The poisoned alcohol damaged the health of dozens of other people, and many of them lost their sight.[1]
As the main organisers who put the dangerous mixture on sale, the court named the owner of a company producing car cosmetics and that company's sales representative, who came from Slovakia. At the end of summer 2012, at the turn of August and September, the owner obtained five thousand litres of methyl alcohol and rented premises in Opava. Together with the representative he prepared there ten thousand litres of a liquid consisting of methanol and ethanol. Other people delivered it across a large part of the country.[1]
Investigation
In connection with the production and distribution of the poisonous spirits, the police gradually prosecuted roughly seventy people.[1] The media published the names of the two producers three weeks after the death in Havířov. Both men were taken into custody, as was the person in charge of the main part of the distribution.[1] It was he who later contributed to clarifying the case with his testimony.[1]
Court proceedings
The trial in the so-called main branch of the case began in March 2014. After two months the court in Zlín handed down its verdict: both producers received life sentences. According to a report from that time, it concerned the mixing of a blend by which more than a hundred people were poisoned.[1][2] The verdicts were upheld by the High Court in Olomouc and then by the Supreme Court of the Czech Republic. They could still turn to the Constitutional Court, which rejected the complaint of one of the men in June 2019 and that of the other in January 2020, in both cases as manifestly unfounded.[1][2]
Five other defendants from the main branch of the case received unsuspended sentences of between seven and nine years. In May 2014 the main distributor was sent to prison for fifteen years for endangering the public. He asked for a retrial, but the Constitutional Court rejected his complaint in September 2019. He spent the period from September 2012 to July 2014 in custody and then began serving his sentence.[1] The courts also dealt with a number of other cases connected with the production, delivery and sale of the poisoned alcohol.[1]
Conditional release of the distributor
Czech Television announced in May 2024 that the main distributor had been released on parole. He had previously served more than two thirds of his fifteen-year sentence. By then only the two producers of the mixture, who had received life sentences, remained in prison.[1]