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Description

Born in: Castilla y León
Age: 21
Offspring: 0
Marital status: Single
Job: Civil Guard
Date of the attack: 14/07/1986
Place of the attack: Madrid
Guilties: José Ignacio de Juana Chaos, Antonio Troitiño Arranz, Idoia López Riaño, Inés del Río Prada, Esteban Esteban Nieto, Juan Manuel Soares Gamboa, Santiago Arrospide Sarasola "Santi Potros".
Weapon: Car bomb
Killed by: ETA

Description

Each morning, a Civil Guard convoy consisting of a coach, a minibus and an off-road vehicle took seventy officers, aged between 18 and 25, from the Traffic School on Calle Príncipe de Vergara to the motorcycle practice ground in Venta de la Rubia, on the outskirts of Madrid. On the morning of 14 June 1986, ETA terrorists planted a van containing 35 kilograms of explosives and various kilograms of shrapnel in Plaza de la República Dominicana. They detonated the explosives as the Civil Guard convoy was passing Number 7. Twelve civil guards were killed and a further 78 people (including officers and passers-by) were injured by the huge blast.

José Joaquín García Ruiz, aged 21, was originally from  Merindad de Valdivielso (Burgos). “There was so much talk about people being killed, and then they stopped killing…. I wasn’t happy about it, to be honest” —José Joaquín’s mother told Informe Semanal—. “He said that people are killed on the roads all the time, but it doesn’t mean that everyone else has to give up driving. He said there was danger everywhere. He thought nothing would happen to him. He was really looking forward to doing something good, and he didn’t think they would kill him.”

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