Greenpeace Co-Founder Dies

David Fraser McTaggart, a founder of Greenpeace International, was killed Friday in a head-on car crash on a country road in central Italy. He was 68.

Police said McTaggart was alone in his car. The driver of the other car also died and his wife was injured, police said. The accident happened in Umbria, about 20 miles from Perugia.

McTaggart, who was born in Canada, had lived in Italy for many years.

He galvanized the international environmental movement in 1972 when he sailed his small boat into a French nuclear-testing site at Mururua atoll.

He went on to stir up support throughout Europe for Greenpeace, forging an alliance in 1979 among separate factions of the organization and uniting them under his chairmanship as Greenpeace International. He was chairman until 1991.

"He was the last medieval knight, capable of great symbolic acts for the environmental cause," Gianfranco Bologna, a spokesman in Italy for the World Wildlife Fund, said.

Grazia Francescato, president of the Italian Green Party, called McTaggart "a figure of extraordinary force" and "an example for all of us."

David Newmann, ex-director of Greenpeace Italy, described him as a "person of enormous courage and great determination."

Newmann also said McTaggart, sometimes dubbed "the shadow warrior," was "a very difficult person because he was extremely stubborn, extremely tough."

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, on June 24, 1932, McTaggart worked in the construction business for 20 years, then moved to the United States in the 1960s where he became a successful contractor and developer.

He retired after an explosion destroyed a resort his firm had built and sailed the Pacific for pleasure. In 1971 he became outraged with the French Government's decision to cordon off a vast swath of international waters for their nuclear testing program in the Pacific.

McTaggart was also a driving force behind Greenpeace campaigns to save the whales, to stop the dumping of nuclear waste in the ocean, to block the production of toxic wastes, to end nuclear testing, and to protect the Antarctic continent from oil and mineral exploitation.

There was no immediate information on survivors or funeral arrangements.