"Spain isn't over the Civil War yet"

"I don't tell anyone how old I am. Allow me this little vanity. Put that I'm almost 100..."

Carlota Leret isn't almost 100, but it's true she is older than you might think from looking at the barely visible wrinkles on her face or the leather trousers she wears to the interview.

Leret is the daughter of Pamplona-born jet-engine inventor Virgilio Leret. She has just flown in from Caracas where she has lived since going into exile with her mother in 1941. She has come to Madrid to attend the premiere of the documentary Virgilio Leret, El caballero azul (or Virgilio Leret, The blue knight), directed by Mikel Donazar and sponsored by the Spanish airport authority AENA.

"I was just a child but I remember it perfectly. It was July 17, 1936, the day the Civil War started, the day when the guns fired the first shots of fascism, the ideology that would go on to engulf Europe. It was the day on which I saw my father for the last time." Virgilio Leret was then head of the eastern zone of the Air Force in Africa and was stationed in the Hidros de El Atalayon base in Melilla. "My mother, my sister and I were at the base because we had gone to spend the summer in Melilla on a boat we had. They started to sound the sirens and my father took us to the boat. There were no kisses, nor farewells. I remember my mother out on deck watching my father moving further away and my father shouting for her to go inside while shots could be heard."

"Virgilio Leret was shot by his own soldiers. The rebels forced them to do it"

"My father invented the turbo jet. If he'd been a fascist, he'd be celebrated as a hero"

Loyal to the Republican government, Virgilio Leret returned to his post to defend the base from the military-led facist uprising until the ammunition ran out. They never saw him again.

"My father was the first person executed by firing squad in the Civil War," she says. "The first military man murdered for carrying out his duty." The filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar referred to Leret in a documentary released last June that denounced the unpunished deaths of 15 victims of Francoism.

Carlota has found evidence that prove her father was shot by firing squad at dawn on July 18. "Six months ago I got a call from the poet Angelina Gatell, who was married to a soldier at the Hidros base. Her husband found his comrades on July 18, trembling and weeping as they told him: "We killed Captain Leret!" My father was shot by his own soldiers. The rebels made them do it as a way of sowing terror."

"We've hardly spoken about the jet engine and that is the most important thing," she says suddenly. "In 1935, one year before the war began, my father invented the turbo compressor jet engine. My mother [the writer Carlota O'Neill, of Mexican origin], who was imprisoned after my father's death for 'greatly influencing the conduct of her husband,' according to the war council, managed to smuggle the plans of his invention out of prison wrapped in dirty clothes. The parents of a fellow inmate kept them until she left, in 1941. When she was freed, my mother took the plans, hid them about her person and offered them to the British Embassy because she thought the engine could help the Allies against Hitler, but they didn't do anything," she says.

Carlota has devoted more than 10 years to restoring her father's name. "If he had been a fascist, Virgilio Leret would have had a street or a square named after him; he would have appeared in text books; [and] they would have paid him tributes. But as he was a Republican, nobody knows he was a hero. I'm angry that when I talk about these things people straight away tell me not to stir things up, that I am inciting hatred. Spain still isn't cured of the Civil War. There has been no justice. And speaking about these things does not open wounds, but precisely the opposite: it helps to close them."