Eddie has appeared in several Iron Maiden album covers including Killers. Ever-present at Iron Maiden concerts, it has often appeared above the drummer with ‘blood’ spitting through its mouth.
Eddie the Head, the blood-spitting skeletal mascot of the heavy metal rock group Iron Maiden, has been displayed in a Spanish town hall as part of a political war of symbolism.
By Alastair Jamieson
The demonic face, a regular feature of the band’s violent album cover designs, features regularly at council meetings in the town of Villava in Navarre.
Because Basque separatist councillors insist on hanging the Basque flag on their desks during debates, upset rivals opposed to the idea of the Navarre region being treated as part of the Basque country have adopted the Iron Maiden flag as their own emblem.
The Socialist leader, José Luis Uriz, said: “The Iron Maiden flag means a lot to me. If I have to put up with their flag, they’ll have to put up with Eddie’s face.”
The conservative Navarrese People’s Union party has joined the protest, with its councillors now hang the flag of the local La Liga football club, Osasuna, from their desks.
Eddie The Head, whose first incarnation was created by an art student from a melted plastic face mask, is ever-present at Iron Maiden concerts. It has often appeared above the drummer with ‘blood’ spitting through its mouth.
Navarre, in northern Spain, borders the Basque Country and is divided between Basque speakers and Spanish speakers. Earlier this month, police in Navarre detained four men overnight on charges of staging acts of street violence in support of the militant Basque separatist group ETA.
On Sunday, four Spanish soldiers who were killed over the past year by ETA were honoured during Spain’s traditional national day military parade.
Family members of the victims attended a ceremony for the four, as well as for eight other soldiers killed over the past 12 months, held just before the start of the parade through the central streets of Madrid.
ETA has killed 824 people in Spain in its 40-year campaign of bombings and shootings for an independent Basque homeland in parts of northeastern Spain and southwestern France.
Aftermath News 
First!
Dear US Government and IRS,
Please tell the FBI that Eddie the long winded skeleton man name guy may just well use his axe to attack the ant that attacked him in the first place.
In Australia, we have any number of drug and alcohol abusers who listen to this crap music, simply because they were preyed upon with doping, violence and physical abuse as children. Their hormones run wild and do stupid and illegal things beyond what stupid and illegal things that the average teenage or prepubescent person does.
No, as bad as the music is, I am very much of the opinion that this Eddie fellow is not trying to remove hymina of young women, nor attack the white phallus of a feminist woman, rather, should likely be attacking either the left mandible or the pointy thing on the rear left leg of an ant: for a human being, this is the left chin or lower left leg. Folklore has it that this is where most paedophiles seem to make first, or the most memorable, or the part of the body most readily spoken about by victims.
For all I know, the Apache Nation argue something very similar.
Bye for now. Yes, it was a particulary odd email to write on a Sydney Sunday morning, but yes, you are likely really quite sane.
Dan Bergseng LLB
Solicitor (non-practising)
PS I’d rather be interviewed by American authorities about this in the States. Truly, this is not a cry for help, but Australian military are easily swayed by hapless State Police here in Sydney. And vice versa. I trust the same can happen in your own neck of the woods. Most people go quite stupid about these things. Often the investigators were victims themselves, of those, who turn bad, they become the most hardened criminal around.