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Obituary: Lucio Urtubia Jiménez

Lucio Urtubia Jiménez Basque anarchist & bricklayer. Born in Cascante, Navarra, 18 February 1931 – died in Paris, 18 July 2020. The film-bio

Freedom News

The film-biography of Lucio Urtubia (“Lucio” 2007) turned him into a legend as some sort of anarchist Robin Hood. But until the age of fifty, Lucio had spent most of his time trying to keep out of the limelight. The spectacular conclusion to his life of crime in 1981, with the Citibank forgery trial, was a pyrrhic victory for the prosecution; Lucio was the real winner against all the odds.

Lucio was many things to many people. Radical theatre director Albert Boadella, whose dramatic escape from under the noses of the Spanish police in 1977 was organised by Lucio, dubbed him ‘a Quixote who tilted, not at windmills, but at real giants’. French counter-terrorist cop Paul Barril cast Lucio as a dangerous criminal mastermind who pulled the strings of a vast international anarchist conspiracy. And the examining magistrate who presided over the Citibank case, Louis Joinet, had Lucio round to dinner, twice! To Stuart Christie, Lucio was ‘a man of generous spirit who valued freedom and justice above all else, even above his own life’