Vera Mol, a 17-year-old from the Netherlands, was standing on a 40-metre-high bridge on Spain’s northern coast, bracing for her first bungee jump.

It was 8:30 p.m., and she was the last in a group of 13 teenagers to go, when the instructor gave a command.

“No jump, it’s important, no jump,” he said in English, according to court documents. But Mol, apparently misunderstanding his pronunciation, heard, “Now jump.” She threw herself from the ledge — and plunged to her death. The harness she was wearing had not yet been secured to the bridge.

This month, an appeals court in Cantabria, in northern Spain, upheld a ruling that the instructor for Aqua21 Aventura, the company that had organized the bungee jump in August 2015, could face criminal charges, including accidental homicide, should prosecutors decide to proceed with the case.

The company appealed last year, arguing that the teenager had jumped prematurely, and that her death was an accident.

In its ruling, the appeals court said that the instructor, who has not been publicly identified, had spoken in broken English, and it blamed his linguistic shortcomings in part for Mol’s death.

The instructor should have said, “Don’t jump,” the court said. The ruling added that the instructor’s English had not been sufficient to instruct foreigners in “something as precarious as jumping into the void from an elevated point.”

The court said the misunderstanding was the result of “the incorrect use and pronunciation of English,” noting that the instructor had acknowledged that he spoke the language only at a basic level.

At the time of the accident, the local authorities for the village of Cabezon de la Sal in Cantabria, near where Mol died, told the newspaper El Pais that the bridge was “extremely risky,” that tour operators had no right to use it for bungee jumping, and that they had not known that such activities were taking place.

In its ruling, issued on June 7 but made public only recently, the court also took the company to task for failing to determine whether the victim was underage and therefore also failing to get the necessary consent from Mol’s parents.

The court also found that the company did not have the proper security measures in place and did not have a permit to allow bungee jumping from the spot where the teenager plunged to her death.

The group of teenagers had waited “on the edge of the abyss,” the court said.

Flowtrack, a company based in Belgium that organized the students’ trip to Spain and that hired Aqua21 Aventura to handle the excursion where the bungee jump took place, said the Spanish company had failed to abide by regulations.

Reached by phone, Aqua21 Aventura said it had no comment. The man who answered, who declined to give his name, said it was “ridiculous that an international newspaper is interested in this story.”

The first bungee jump using modern equipment took place on April 1, 1979, when a group of Oxford University students, who were members of the Dangerous Sports Club, jumped from the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, in the southwest of England.

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One of the students, David Kirke, wearing a top hat and tails, jumped with a glass of champagne in hand. The students were immediately arrested. But they helped to spread the activity globally, and eventually also jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

Injuries from bungee jumping have included rope burn, dislocations, eye damage and trauma. Accidents can occur, among other things, if the cord is too long or the jumper is not properly secured.

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