The dark shadow of the drug thalidomide is still with us. The original catastrophe maimed thousands of babies and killed far more: it remains one of the greatest man-made global disasters.

Documents recently unearthed by the UK’s Thalidomide Trust will surely stoke fresh controversy about how and why the criminal trial against the drug’s makers ended without a verdict in December 1970.

The Trust, which is tasked with looking after the wellbeing of the British victims maimed in the womb by the drug, hired an investigator through the law firm Ince & Co. to look through state records in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, where the case was tried. The goal was to discover any malfeasance behind the decision to discontinue the trial.