Who's next, a newspaper cartoonist asked. Darth Vader?
He was referring to the crusading Spanish judge with an appetite for big, perhaps uncatchable fish: first, ex-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and now Osama bin Laden.
The cartoon in El Mundo depicts Judge Baltasar Garzon pointing imperiously at the Star Wars villain, ordering Spanish cops to nab him.
Garzon's surprise indictment Wednesday of the reputed Sept. 11 mastermind and 34 other terror suspects has shined yet more limelight on the dapper judge, stirring debate on whether his passion for justice is also a grab for celebrity.
A human rights lawyer defends what Garzon is doing. But Spain's attorney general sounds underwhelmed by the latest 700-page ruling, and a senior opposition politician asks whether the Spanish judicial system shouldn't rather deal with its own backlog of crime.
And some Spanish media, while calling Garzon brave for going after the world's most wanted man, labeled his crusade an ultimately futile exercise in making headlines.
"Let's be serious," La Vanguardia's Lluis Foix wrote in a Web page piece hours after the indictment came out. "Garzon getting his picture on the cover of The New York Time tomorrow means nothing more than just that."
His title is judge, but Garzon is more like a US district attorney, although in Spain the job is filled by an exam, not an election. Garzon got it at 32 to become the youngest investigative magistrate at the National Court, Spain's highest criminal tribunal. which deals with serious offenses like terrorism.
At 47, married with three children, the workaholic from a modest background in Spain's olive-growing Jaen region is an undisputed legal juggernaut who has taken on every conceivable kind of criminal: millionaire drug lords, armed Basque separatists and the government-backed death squads that targeted them.
Because of Basque threats he has had a bodyguard for 15 years.
Garzon rose to international fame in 1998 by having Pinochet arrested while the aging ex-dictator visited London, seeking to bring him to Madrid for trial on charges of human rights abuses in his native Chile.
Spanish courts let Garzon proceed, but after more than a year of legal wrangling Britain freed Pinochet on health grounds and sent him home.
In that case, in recent suits seeking extradition of 40 former Argentine military officers for trial here and to some extent in the bin Laden indictment, Garzon invoked Spanish legislation spelling out crimes deemed so heinous they can be tried in Spain even if they were not committed there.
But El Mundo said that were bin Laden caught, he would certainly be tried in the US. "Thus, one cannot arrive at any other conclusion: this time, Garzon Superstar's desire for notoriety has led him to overdo it."
Attorney General Jesus Cardenal, while reserving final judgment on the indictment until he had read it all, noted that he has never agreed with court rulings giving Spain cross-border jurisdiction.
Although some accuse him of being publicity-hungry, Garzon is notoriously media-shy and rarely gives interviews. But he did talk to El Pais in an interview a week ago.
"We cannot fight a crime against humanity if we do not accept the priority of universal justice," he said. "It should be possible to pursue the authors of these acts anywhere in the world ... .
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