David McTaggart, the Canadian co-founder of the environmental pressure group Greenpeace, died in a car crash in Italy last night.
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David McTaggart
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McTaggart, 69, died after his car was involved in a collision with another vehicle near the city of Perugia.
Hehelped found Greenpeace in the early 1970s and was its chairman for over a decade until 1991.
He led the group through what many consider to be its vintage years, spearheading protests against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
He continued to be Greenpeace's honorary chairman in the 1990s, but with his health failing, he retired to Umbria to live on a farm producing olive oil.
"He was an iconic figure and one of those people you could say helped the world," said Ms Jo Dufay, the Campaign Director for Greenpeace Canada.
"People are shocked and in a sense of disbelief. He was a man so full of life and it's hard to believe he's not alive," she said.
McTaggart was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1932. He left school at 17 and became a Canadian national badminton champion before starting a construction company.
An accidental explosion in 1969 at a ski lodge he had built in California left him with a big bill for damages and prompted him to turn his back on business.
He bought a boat, the Vega, and sailed the South Pacific islands until 1972, when a chance sighting of a Canadian newspaper advertisement changed his life.
The ad, placed by the tiny Don't Make a Wave committee, later renamed Greenpeace, called for volunteers to sail to the Polynesian atoll of Mururoa in a bid to stop French atmospheric tests of nuclear warheads.
McTaggart, outraged by the French government's decision to close off vast areas of the Pacific, responded to the appeal, renamed his boat Greenpeace III, and sailed to Mururoa.
He anchored his boat downwind from the planned test, forcing the French to halt the first test and prompting the French navy to ram his vessel.
After repairing his boat, McTaggart returned to the atoll a year later only to be captured and beaten up by French military officers, an assault that permanently damaged his right eye.
McTaggart was also at the helm of Greenpeace in 1985 when French agents blew up the group's Rainbow Warriorship in Auckland harbor, killing a photographer.
He was expelled from France in 1995 for trying to disrupt nuclear tests again, and a year later was one of a group of Greenpeace veterans who launched a scathing attack on the group's new leaders, saying Greenpeace had lost its way and needed to rediscover its radical agenda.