23. The Vain Assassin
Eager to prove herself, Idoia Lopez Riano killed her first victim, a businessman suspected of financing anti-ETA paramilitaries, in 1984. In one particularly lethal five month stretch, she participated in twenty murders, including a Madrid bombing that killed twelve people. She sometimes seduced victims she was assigned to kill before murdering them. Riano had a string of lovers, one of them a policeman who only discovered she was an ETA assassin when he saw her on TV after she killed his comrades. Despite her ruthlessness as an assassin, friction developed with Riano’s ETA comrades because her vanity sometimes jeopardized their missions and put them at risk. On one occasion, she delayed an operation because she lost a shoe. On another, she placed an entire ETA cell at risk at a critical moment during a mission, and missed a target, because she stopped to admire her reflection on a store window.
A beautiful woman with curly black hair and strikingly beautiful blue eyes, Riano went out of her way to showcase herself. Her comrades tried hard to convince her that, as an assassin, she needed to be inconspicuous. As one of them wrote, “She could not move in Madrid because she attracted too much attention … none of us wanted to accompany her“. Exasperated ETA leaders finally forced her to quit Spain and move to Algeria, and then to France, where she was arrested in 1994. She spent five years in a French prison, then was extradited to Spain, where she was tried and convicted of murdering 23 people. Riano was expelled from the ETA in 2011, after she publicly condemned the group’s violence, and apologized for actions. She was released from prison in 2017, after 23 years behind bars.
