Juan Manuel Sarmiento Somoza

Description

Juan Manuel Sarmiento Somoza was a retired man on vacation at Salou beach with his wife and daughter on February 13, 1999, when he spotted an explosive device made of chlorate gunpowder. He attempted to deactivate it but was unsuccessful and died.

The Guardia Civil linked the explosion to the sending, the previous week, of three anonymous letters to the tourism boards of Salou and Cambrils, in which a payment of one hundred million pesetas was demanded under the threat of detonating bombs on the cliffs of both towns.

For the family, it was an additional suffering that Juan Manuel was investigated as a suspected author of the letters and the placement of the explosives. “They killed him. The ones who didn’t inform that there could be bombs on the beach killed my husband,” complained Cándida Lasbats, his widow, in statements to El País upon learning that the Salou City Council had not disclosed this campaign against the region’s tourism interests. Cándida could not understand how her husband was linked to working with explosives when “he had only worked at the Cercs thermal power plant.” “He had never even owned a pellet gun,” she assured. However, for her, the greatest grievance was that the threats the municipality had received were not disclosed: “They did it just to avoid alarming tourists and losing clients.” “They killed him when he had no guilt at all.”

A few days after the attack that took Juan Manuel’s life, a Guardia Civil officer was injured when another homemade explosive device detonated, also on the same beach.

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