Random soldier battle animations don´t work

The init.lua for a soldier contains tables
   attack_success_e = {
      "atk_ok_e",
   },
   evade_success_w = {
      "eva_ok_w",
   },
   die_w = {
      "die_w",
   },
etc. The idea, according to the documentation, is that if several entries exist, one is chosen at random. This is not the case.
When a soldier is killed, it is always the animation named "die_w"/"die_e" that gets called.
If the table looks like this:
   die_w = {
      "die_w_0",
      "die_w_1",
   },
and the "animations" table contains no animation named "die_w", the game crashes with:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'Widelands::MapObjectDescr::AnimationNonexistent'
Thread 1 "widelands" received signal SIGABRT, Aborted.

Also, if the animation "die_w" exists but is not listed in the table die_w, it is still the only animation that will be played at the soldier´s death.