Felipe Sandoval

He was regarded variously by fellow prisoners as a man of no beliefs or ideas, a professional criminal or simply a killer or thug.

He left Spain and settled in Paris, where from 1926 he would attend meetings of the anarchist Juan García Oliver, a founder of the armed group Los Solidarios which had been organized to counter oppressive practices by employers and government sectors against the unions in Barcelona; at these meetings he would find other anarchists who'd fled Spain.

Los solidarios was also a precursor to the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) in Spain, which became allied to the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), a grouping of anarcho-syndicalist trade unions.

At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, in July 1936, he was recovering from a bout of tuberculosis in the cárcel Modelo de Madrid when prisoners were released, many joining anarchist groups.

Sandoval's group of assassins - all released criminals - roamed the city in a car targeting pro-Nationalists elements and taking revenge on former captors by killing prison staff.

On 21 August 1936, he led two groups of the CPIP militia to the cárcel Modelo de Madrid to continue questioning Falangist prisoners, who had been searched, interrogated, harangued and robbed by militia since 15 August following rumours of Falangist sympathisers amongst prison staff and a planned escape attempt.

An external machine-gun attack - later presumed to have been set up by anarchist militiamen at Sandoval's direction - killed seven right-wing prisoners and injured others.

He killed himself by falling from the window of a house on Calle de Almagro in Madrid, which was a makeshift police station as there were so many Republican prisoners elsewhere.