Jon Idigoras, who has died in Bilbao aged 69, was for many years the public face of the Basque terrorist group ETA, at least as far as the Spanish public was concerned.
It is unlikely that he was ever actually a member of ETA, though he was facing charges for membership, laid by the high-profile Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, at the time of his death.
He was a founder of and a leading figure in the pro-independence movement variously known as Herri Batasuna, Euskal Herritarok, and now simply Batasuna, which certainly is, as they would say in Belfast, "close to the thinking" of ETA.
As long ago as 1993, members of ETA's inner circle accused him of "having moments of doubt", when he remarked that the group's "armed struggle is on a collision course with its politics".
Such accusations from such sources would have frozen out a lesser man in radical Basque politics, where criticism of ETA has only recently become acceptable.
But Idigoras remained a beloved icon of the pro-independence movement and again castigated ETA publicly when it ended its truce in 1999. Though close to the final phase of a pulmonary illness, he was recalled for a last public appearance as recently as last November, when he strongly backed calls for a peaceful resolution of the Basque conflict.
However, his stance in the 1980s, at the height of his influence, was much more hardline. When an Irish Times reporter asked him why he refused to condemn ETA's terrorism in that period, he replied that "all deaths are unacceptable - but they do change things". ETA has killed more than 800 people, many of them civilians, since 1968.
Idigoras devoted his entire life to the causes of Basque independence and socialism, as he understood those terms. He was elected several times, both to the Basque parliament and the Cortes in Madrid, though he usually refused to take his seat. He was a fine orator, using a fiery, witty rhetoric which delighted his supporters and incensed his opponents.
He was also a complex character. His disarming charm and utterly irreverent sense of humour distinguished him immediately from many of his closest comrades, who tend to be dour and dogmatic.
Idigoras was born in Amorebieta, an industrial town near Bilbao, in 1936, the year in which Gen Franco began his assault on the Republic. Jon Idigoras opposed this unsavoury regime from a very early age, starting as a militant in the factory where he enrolled as an apprentice metal worker at the age of 14. However, he was far from a stereotypical Basque leftist. He took up bull-fighting, an art at which many Basque nationalists look askance, and nearly became a professional.His political activities - he also co-founded the radical union Lab - inevitably brought him to the attention of the police. He served two years in prison in the 1970s, before going into exile in the French Basque Country for the last years of the dictatorship.
He would be imprisoned again for attempting to disseminate a video publicising ETA's political stance in the 1990s, and he lived to see Batasuna banned by the Spanish parliament in 2002.
He was famous for his face - a female journalist who shared his politics wrote after his death: "He was almost perfectly ugly, which made him remarkably attractive to women."
He is survived by his wife, Begoña Azurmendi.
Jon Idigoras Gerrikabeitia:born May 3rd, 1936; died June 3rd, 2005