TRIBUTES have been paid to Rafael Gomez Nieto, the last member of the resistance unit that helped liberate Paris in 1944, following his death from coronavirus.

The Spanish-civil-war veteran was 99 when he died in a Strasbourg nursing home last week.

French President Emmanuel Macron said that with Mr Gomez’s passing, “part of our French and European history has gone, that of the Spanish civil war and the second world war, that of the odyssey of Spanish republicans engaged in the fight to suppress the nazi yoke.”