MADRID: He has put dictators, torturers, terrorists and drug barons in the dock. Now, he himself faces an extraordinary battery of criminal charges.

The already astonishing drama surrounding Spain’s crusading “superjudge”, Baltasar Garzon, hit a new peak on Sunday as corruption was added to the charges against him and thousands of his supporters blocked streets around the supreme court in Madrid.

The continuing trials faced by Garzon over his controversial investigations into mass killings by the Francoist dictatorship and corruption in the ruling People’s party (PP) have already seen his case compared to France’s infamous Dreyfus affair. “This is deplorable and intolerable,” said the Workers’ Commissions trade union leader, Ignacio Fernandez Toxo.

But a fresh charge of taking bribes from Santander bank while on sabbatical at New York University, which has been angrily denied by Garzon and all those involved, has fuelled worries that the world’s most famous human rights investigator is being subjected to a concerted campaign of persecution. “I am facing the firing squad, but I’ve asked them to take off the blindfold,” the man who had Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet arrested said in an aside during one of three trials he currently faces for alleged abuse of his powers.

On Tuesday, for the third week running, he returns to the supreme court, where he usually sits stern-faced in his black magistrate’s robe with embroidered cuffs under a painted ceiling featuring child-throttlers and knife-wielding assassins.

He is accused of perverting the course of justice by opening an investigation into the fate of 114,000 people killed by Francisco Franco’s regime. Garzon believes he will win his case on appeal, but has long been convinced supreme court judges are determined to declare him guilty and expel him from their ranks.—By arrangement with the Guardian