A man who took part in one of the most notorious politically motivated crimes of Spain's recent history has been extradited from Brazil, where he had been in hiding for years.
Carlos García Juliá was one of three men who burst into an office in Atocha in central Madrid in 1977, opening fire and killing three labour lawyers, a law student and a clerk and injuring four others. The killers were right-wing extremists who targeted the victims due to their left-wing leanings.
In 1980, Juliá was arrested and found guilty on five counts of murder and four of attempted murder. He was given a jail sentence of 193 years, although the law meant he could not serve more than 30 years.
Fourteen years into his sentence he was granted conditional release. Although he was supposed to confirm his whereabouts on a regular basis, the Spanish authorities lost track of him as he reportedly moved through Latin America.
False Venezuelan identity
In 2018, they caught up with Juliá, who was living in Brazil under a false Venezuelan identity and working as a driver for Uber. After exhausting his possible appeals, the Brazilian supreme court agreed to extradite Juliá, who is in his mid-60s.
He arrived in Madrid on a flight from São Paulo in the early hours of Friday, accompanied by a Spanish diplomat. He was then taken to Madrid’s Soto del Real prison, where he is expected to serve the remainder of his sentence.
“Today, democracy and justice triumph again,” tweeted Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, who described the so-called Atocha killings as “a slaughter that could not halt the desire for freedom of all society”.
Post-Franco violence
Another man involved in the murders, José Fernandez Cerrá, was released from prison in 1992. The third man directly linked to the crime, Fernando Lerdo de Tejada, fled the country before facing trial and has never been caught.
The killings were part of a wave of far-right violence at a sensitive moment in Spain's transition to democracy following the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who had died two years earlier. Tens of thousands of people turned out on the streets for the burial of the victims.
The widespread outrage that followed the attack was seen as a factor in accelerating the legalisation of the Communist Party, which subsequently played an important role in the new political landscape.
