The court martial of the three anarchists was held on 9 January 1974 and all three were sentenced to death, pending Franco’s signature. It wasn’t long in coming in the case of Salvador Puig Antich. He was garroted at dawn on 2 March 1974 in the patio of Barcelona’s Model Prison. It was a horrific sensation that morning when I heard the news of his judicial murder, and the manner of his death. I kept running and re-running the whole scene in my mind’s eye like the courtyard execution scene of the Algerian patriot in Gilo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers.
Franco had been thirsting for blood after the assassination of Carrero Blanco. Puig Antich was the scapegoat…
The response of anti-fascists around Europe was immediate – with protest marchest, pickets, petitions, and bomb attacks on Francoist institutions around the world and railway lines into Spain blocked or sabotaged by protestors. A main target was the Madrid-Paris express. More arrests followed.