Counting the cost

The four men who lost their lives were: Antonio Ballarri, a 28-year-old Barcelona journalist; Joaquín Morera Benaches, a 52-year-old fire marshal, also from Barcelona; Mario de Roia, a 31-year-old Italian-Canadian journalist with the CHIN radio station in Toronto, who also freelanced for the Italian weekly, AutoSprint; and Andrés Ruiz Villanova, a 38-year-old spectator from the Aragon province, who had been allowed to stand in the restricted area without a track pass.

Among the nine seriously injured, three had the correct accreditation. They were: Joseph Georges Bertolotti, a Monegasque photojournalist working for the Automobile Club de Monaco, who took many months to recover from a massive head trauma; Hans Jurben, 28, a German journalist; and Sergio Gil Trullen, a Spanish reporter with the Mundo Deportivo newspaper.

There were many other spectators illegitimately watching from the restricted area, and six of them had to be taken to hospital: Monserrat Masip Fornet, 21; Federico Rodríguez Navascues, 21; Javier Figueras Pañalver, 11; Pedro Arqués Pascual, 35; and Joaquín Flaquer Pous (all were Spanish). At first, Italian-Canadian Carmen Vigliatore, a 30-year-old employee of a Toronto service garage, who had struck up a friendship with de Roia on the transatlantic flight to Spain, had been wrongly listed as a fifth fatality, but was discharged after five weeks with leg injuries.