The early morning of January 17, 1982 was released, in the town Zaragozana de Trasmoz, Julio Iglesias Puga (1915-2005) after 20 days of captivity.
The father of the singer Julio Iglesias had been kidnapped in Madrid by an ETA command on December 29, 1981 as he was going to consult him.
He was approached by some false German journalists who told him they wanted to interview him for a documentary about his son’s life.
Three days ago that he had returned from Miami to spend Christmas Eve with the children of him, Julio and Carlos, and his still wife Rosario de la Cueva, from which he had been separated for five years after she decided to move with her firstborn
.
“Do not put resistance and go better, this is a kidnapping,” he told his captors at a pistol point and, after forcing him to take somniferous, they managed, covered him with a sack and put him inside the trunk.
The hijacker command was formed by José Luis Gutiérrez Guti, his wife and the daughter of both, Gloria, a Basque family that had gone to live in Trasmoz after buying a house was more than a year ago.
And, next to them, I was Baltasar Calvo, a couple of the daughter, neighbor of Trasmoz, who was in charge of moving to the kidnapped from Madrid.
He got on a tiny room of four meters by three and without a window, the same one where the Valencian businessman Luis Suñer had been kidnapped for three months.
As it was checked after the rescue, in the room there was a wooden bed, two blankets, two sheets, a doorless closet, a basin of basin and a bucket that served as a toilet.
Remains of the last dinner were also appreciated: a hard boiled egg, tertencan bones, a glass of milk and another water.
Then, and even today, the house was visited and curiosity, especially the bed where I churches slept, to the point that a judicial permit was necessary.
The housing, isolated from the rest, consisted of three separate floors with each other.
In the second the gynecologist was kidnapped, in the third they had mounted a large tent and in the kitchen they had made a hole that led to a zero in an old warehouse where they had up to 40,000 cartridges.
On the day of liberation, transmoz, a town of only a hundred neighbors located at the foot of the Moncayo, was partying, at night the bonfires of San Anton burned and there was a full moon, so the operation had to be delayed until the
Three in the morning.
The GEO (Special Operations Group) had come to Trasmoz commanded by Commissioner Juan Domingo Martorell and were about to assault the house where the kidnapped was located.
They knocked down the door with explosives and agents dressed in costumes and antibral helmets, which churches pugue confused with astronauts, rescued him.
“Doctor Iglesias, you are liberated. Congratulations,” was the first thing they told him.
The one in charge of communicating the good news to the singer was the government’s own president, Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, who told him that his father was in perfect condition, although he had lost some weight.
The press conference, in principle planned in Madrid, in the end was made outside in Miami and had to be delayed, as stated, by the emotional state of the singer’s father.
When the police broke into the house, the kidnappers were sleeping and the geo immediately took churches pugging that at first he thought they were going to kill him.
The police had to insist: “Doctor, we are the good ones and we have come to rescue him.”
And given the emotional state in which he was forgotten his denture, who had left her in a glass with water and then found an interviu reporter.
Until days later she could not recover her and hence everything was delayed, including the press conference.
The authors of the kidnapping were arrested and the Prosecutor’s Office asked for them for them for them between 11 and 15 years who ended up reduced by half.
Especially the Baltasar Calvo, whom he was only accused of “collaboration with armed band” despite having transported it from Madrid to Zaragoza.
During the judgment Iglesias Puga surprised the jury by praising his captors for the treatment received and renouncing the compensation that corresponded to him.
He even explained that he had delivered 10,000 pesetas to the captors of him to get clean clothes.
ETA never publicly claimed the kidnapping because it maintained a fictitious truce since February of that year.
Therefore, in an attempt that they do not relate to them, they asked Carlos El Chacal help, who revealed that “the agreement was eight million dollars for ETA and two for us.”
Finally it was said that ETA asked for 2,000 million pesetas to the Churches family to free the doctor, although he always assured that they were not paid “not a cent”.
Time later, Julio Iglesias hired Martorell to direct his personal safety and that of his children, Chabeli, Julio José and Enrique, who, after the kidnapping of his grandfather, left Madrid, where they lived with his mother, Isabel Preysler, and he
They went to Miami with the singer.
Dr. Iglesias Puga, in an attempt to make normal life, returned to Madrid and became a public character with the nickname of Papuchi, who put the heart press for his relationships with much younger women than him.
He was secretly married at 86 years with Ronna Keitt, 42, with which he had 11 years of relationship.
A link that he did not recognize publicly until he died of his first woman, and from which James Nathaniel Churches was born in 2004 and a posthumous daughter, Ruth, a few months after his death.
Papuchi died of a cardiac arrest on December 19, 2005.
