Francisco Paesa

Francisco Paesa (Madrid, Spain, 11 April, 1936- ) is an agent of Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, the Spanish secret service

He began his business career conducting various businesses with Francisco Macías Nguema, the then dictator of Equatorial Guinea. In 1976 he was arrested by Interpol in Belgium and imprisoned in Switzerland and it is believed that he collaborated with the paramilitary group GAL.

After serving his sentence he posed as an arms dealer who sold two antiaircraft missiles to ETA. The terrorist group did not know that the missiles had a location signal. The police could find, for the first time, a major hideout in which a large number of weapons and documents were stored. Until then, the Spanish government knew virtually nothing about ETA logistics and this operation was an important turning point.

Judge Baltasar Garzón issued a warrant of arrest for Francisco Paesa on December 1, 1988 for collaboration with armed band and use of false identities.

Luis Roldán, known for being the general of the Spanish Civil Guard when a big scandal of corruption arose in 1993, have said that Paesa tricked him into stealing all the money that Roldán had previously stolen in that case but the judicial case on the research to hide the heritage of Luis Roldán was filed in 2004, as the crime had prescribed.

In 1998 he faked a fatal cardiac arrest in Thailand. Obituaries were published and a death certificate was forged. His family even commissioned thirty Gregorian Masses for his soul. The Spanish authorities believed that he had faked his death and he had escaped with two billion pesetas (given to him by Roldán).

He reappeared on Spanish media in 2004. He was mentioned as an organizer of an operation to overthrow Equatorial Guinea dictator Obiang with an army of mercenaries. Some say that Francisco Paesa was spotted by a detective agency in Barcelona, others in France and some in Luxembourg. However, everyone agreed that he had an Argentine passport with the name Francisco Pando Sánchez.

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