SPAIN’s exiled king has revealed for the first time how he accidentally shot dead his younger brother while playing with a loaded pistol.
The disgraced 87-year-old royal lives in the Gulf state of Abu Dhabi after being cast out over a series of financial and sex scandals.
But he has now penned a tell-all memoir in which he has finally admitted for the first time that he killed his brother Alfonso, when they were teenagers nearly 70 years ago.
Juan Carlos draws on painful memories as he recounts the tragedy at a royal residence in Portugal in 1956 when he was 18 and Alfonso was 14.
His 500-page autobiography called Reconciliation revealed the brothers were “playing” with a pistol when the fatal shot was fired.
He says of the shooting: “I didn’t like to talk about it, and this is the first time I do”
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“I will not recover from this tragedy. Its gravity will accompany me forever.
“We had taken out the magazine [a gun storage]. We had no idea there was a bullet left in the chamber.
“A shot was fired into the air, the bullet ricocheted and struck my brother squarely in the forehead. He died in our father’s arms.”
Juan Carlos was playing with a Star Bonifacio Echeverria automatic pistol, owned by his younger brother when the gun discharged.
As the pair were playing alone in a room, it has always remained unclear how Alfonso was killed.
But one of their mother’s dressmakers, then Princess María, claimed at the time that Juan Carlos aimed the pistol at Alfonso and shot, without realising it was loaded.
Other sources had believed the bullet ricocheted, or a door knocked the former king’s arm, causing him to inadvertently shoot his brother.
The boys’ father, the Count of Barcelona, reportedly grabbed him by the neck and bellowed at him furiously: “Swear to me that you didn’t do it on purpose!”
In the new memoir, it’s revealed the distraught count covered the body of Alfonso in a Spanish flag and threw the pistol into the sea.
No judicial inquiry was conducted into the tragedy at the time.
Juan Carlos was sent back to his military academy and his relationship with his father never recovered.
Juan Carlos said in his book: “It is still difficult for me to speak of it, and I think of it every day … I miss him; I wish I could have him by my side and talk with him.
“I lost a friend, a confidant. He left me with an immense emptiness. Without his death, my life would have been less dark, less unhappy.”
Juan Carlos went into self-imposed exile in 2020 amid financial scandals linked to a Saudi Arabian rail project amid further controversy over his payments to a former lover.
He left Spain to protect his son, King Felipe, from further scandal and is believed to have penned the memoir to draw a line under his troubled past.
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The book, published in France, is believed to be an olive branch to his estranged son.
His home in Abu Dhabi is around 15 miles from a palace recently reported to have been offered to shamed ex-prince Andrew by Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Why was Juan Carlos exiled?
Juan Carlos has lived in self-imposed exile since 2020
- The former king left the country to go into exile abroad following a series of damaging allegations about his financial arrangements.
- At the time it was said his conduct harmed the reputation of the monarchy and embarrassed his son King Felipe.
- King Felipe renounced his inheritance from his father after reports he was in line to receive millions of euros from a secret offshore account with ties to Saudi Arabia.
- Spain’s Supreme court launched an investigation into the former king’s role in a deal in which a Spanish consortium landed a €6.7bn (£5.9bn) contract to build a high-speed rail line between the Saudi cities of Medina and Mecca.
- A letter sent by Juan Carlos was later published and it claimed he would move away from Spain in the wake of the “public repercussions that certain past events” in his private life were causing.
- A man also claimed his mother coerced him into photographing her having sex with King Juan Carlos of Spain for a multimillion pound blackmail scheme.
- Angel Cristo says he was just 13 years old when Bárbara Rey asked him to document her seduction of the Spanish monarch in 1994.
- The footage was used to extort the royal family for decades.