Juuan Carlos Iglesias Chouzas, ‘Gaddafi’, is not just another ETA member; he is not even the one who has committed the most murders. But he is the only one who put a sticky bomb in the car of the father of two two-year-old twins, just for being a civil guard. He went there on November 7, 1991 and he knew that the children got into that vehicle every day, because he carried out the necessary surveillance so as not to be discovered and to be able to ‘hunt’ the victims. The ‘gudari’ did not shake his pulse. This individual is now acquitted of a case by the National Court in application of the Atristrain doctrine of the Court of Strasbourg. But being released from a process will never exempt them from the savagery they did, no matter how much Bildu, a partner of the Government, wants whiten it now.
Him and others like him.
Gaddafi, according to the investigations of the Security Forces, accumulates twenty murders -verified, it should be added-, including that of Fabio. He was arrested in 2000 when he went to an appointment in the French town of Tarnes with the ETA member Concepción Iglesias, whom the French police had been following for two years before. The terrorist, who was accompanied by her young son, and Chouzas could not escape despite the security device, which undoubtedly prevented much more blood from flowing.
Sources from the fight against terrorism consulted by ABC describe one more trait of his character: he was a coward, and that is why most of his victims – whether they were his own or thanks to his necessary cooperation – were killed by sticky bombs. The advantage? That he was guaranteed escape. There were other gunmen, such as Txiribita or Txapela, who at least ran the risk of killing in person. Gaddafi No. He liked the other mode much better.
The arrest of this subject was one of the hardest blows received by the terrorist group that year, a few days before ETA resumed its escalation of murders after ending the truce of September 1998, with that unsuccessful meeting that members of the Government de Aznar maintained with the terrorists in Switzerland. The truth is that the Executive had information, provided by the Police, that the ceasefire was nothing more than a strategy to be able to reorganize and hit harder.
With Gaddafi’s arrest, the gang lost one of its most effective assassins, a former member of the Vizcaya commando and, since his arrival in France in 1996, one of the leaders of the military apparatus. Despite this, ETA ended 200 during that year with the lives of 23 people, a figure that had not been exceeded since 1992.
Gaddafi’s criminal activity had begun when, at the age of 21, in 1984, the Police arrested him for the first time for his relationship with ETA. But then not enough evidence was found against him and he was released, until, a year later, at the age of 22, he fled his home to avoid arrest, after his participation in planting a bomb in the underside of a police car in Guipúzcoa.
In 1987 he joined the Vizcaya commando, whose first action was the kidnapping of the Biscayan businessman Andrés Gutiérrez Blanco, whose family had to pay a ransom of 200 million pesetas for his freedom. From then on, the ETA did nothing but accumulate bodies in his history.
The first, that same year, a second lieutenant of the Civil Guard and an agent of the National Police. And a year later he participated in the murder of José Luis Barrios Capetillo, a waiter son of a socialist councilor from Santurce whom the gang accused of drug trafficking. The hotelier received a shot in the head and in the back, a ‘trademark of the house’, despite the fact that he had never received a complaint for the sale of narcotics.
Between 1990 and 1991, ETA murdered 70 people. In those two years, Gaddafi participated in the death of three national police officers and three civil guards in five different attacks, being himself the one who planted the sticky bomb that ended the life of agent Luis Alfredo Achurra, 37 years old and father of three. sons.
Corpses pile up. Only in 1990 was he linked to murders committed on September 2 and 10; on October 6, November 18 and also on December 14 of that year; on January 9 and 31, 1991, and also on March 21, May 9, June 13, July 28 and August 29… Thus, until reaching the maximum expression of his sadism , on November 7 of that year, with the boy Fabio murdered and his twin Alejandro very seriously wounded, just like his father… Then he continued with his criminal activity.
On March 24, this serial killer was tried for killing former civil guard Francisco Díaz de Cerio in 1991. «I am not going to declare anything. All I want to say is that I am innocent and I don’t know why I am on trial. I’m not going to declare anything.” Bildu, a strategic partner of the Government, is fighting for the freedom of this murderer. At the moment he is not on the street. On December 20, 2020, the Ministry of the Interior decided to bring it closer to the Basque Country, specifically to the Dueñas prison, in Palencia. He recognized the legality of prison, assumed the damage caused and promised not to resort to violence again…
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