From age 3 to 80, Barcelona victims represent a wide world

An Italian father who saved his children's lives but lost his own. An American celebrating his first wedding anniversary. A Portuguese woman celebrating her birthday with her granddaughter.

These were some of the 14 people from around the world killed in vehicle attacks in Barcelona and the nearby seaside resort of Cambrils on Thursday and early Friday. They spanned generations — from age 3 to age 80 — and leave behind devastated loved ones. The victims — who also include over 120 people wounded in the attacks — come from nearly three dozen countries.

A man cries as he prays by a memorial tribute to the van attack victims. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Here is a look at some of them:

Francisco Lopez Rodriguez, 57, and Javier Martinez, 3, Spain

Francisco Lopez Rodriguez was killed with his 3-year-old grand-nephew, Javier Martinez, while walking along the Las Ramblas promenade in Barcelona.

Lopez was accompanied by his wife Roser — who is recovering from her wounds in a hospital — her niece and the niece's two children, one of them Javier.

"He was a lovely man, kind and charitable. Everyone loved him," said 81-year-old Natalia Moreno Perez from Lopez's native town of Lanteira, some 700 inhabitants outside Granada in southern Spain.

"I knew him from when he was a kid, always telling jokes," said Natalia. "Terrible news, the town is in mourning."

Lopez emigrated from the town with his family in the 1960s to seek work. He lived in Rubi, a migrant town of 75,000 people northwest of Barcelona, and had been visiting the Catalan capital.

Leading newspaper El Pais said Lopez worked as a metal worker in Rubi and had been walking back from Barcelona port area when the van burst onto Las Ramblas.

"We are a broken family," niece Raquel Baron Lopez posted on Twitter.

Granddaughter and grandmother, 20 and 74, Portugal

The two were in Barcelona to celebrate the grandmother's birthday when they were caught up in the horror on Las Ramblas, according to Portuguese media reports.

They had arrived in the city for a week's vacation just a few hours before they were killed, Jose Luis Carneiro, Lisbon's secretary of state for Portuguese communities abroad, told reporters.

The older woman was reported dead Friday, while the younger woman was initially reported as missing before finally being identified Saturday.

Those hours left her parents in a painful limbo, Carneiro said.

The parents are "broken-hearted," Carneiro said. "Firstly, because they were caught by surprise by the death of the man's mother and then spent hours not knowing what had happened to their daughter. It's very tragic."

The family's names were not released.

Pepita Codina, 75, Spain

Pepita Codina's death was confirmed by Xavier Vilamala, the mayor of Hipolit de Voldrega, the town of 3,000 people where she was from near Barcelona.

Vilamala said on Twitter he was "very sad and distressed" by the news.

Local media reported that Codina's daughter, Elisabet, was injured in the attack, but is currently out of danger at Hospital del Marin Barcelona.

Bruno Gulotta, 35, Italy

A father from Legnano in northern Italy is being praised as a hero who protected his children during an attack in Barcelona.

One of his Gulotta's work colleagues, Pino Bruno, told the Italian news agency ANSA that he saved the life of his two young children — Alessandro, 6, and Aria, 7 months — by throwing himself between them and the van that mowed people down.

Bruno said he spoke to Gulotta's wife, Martina, and she told him her husband had been holding the 6-year-old's hand on the tourist-thronged avenue in Barcelona when "the van appeared suddenly."

Bruno Gulotta, at center wearing a black shirt, with his colleagues at their office in Legnano, near Milan, Italy. Gulotta is one of the 14 victims of Thursday's deadly van attack in Barcelona. (Tom's Hardware Italy via AP)

"Everyone knelt down, instinctively, as if to protect themselves," Bruno said, adding that Gulotta put himself in front of his children and was fatally struck.

Gulotta was a sales manager for Tom's Hardware Italia, an online publication about technology. "Rest in peace, Bruno, and protect your loved ones from up high," read one tribute on the company's website.

Carmen Lopardo, 80, Italy

Lopardo, apparently the oldest person to die in the attack, was among three Italians killed in Barcelona, according to Italy's foreign ministry.

In a statement, it said Lopardo was killed in the "vile terrorist attack in Barcelona," without providing details.

News reports said Lopardo was an Italian who had immigrated to Argentina in 1950 and was visiting Barcelona.

Silvina Alejandra Pereyra, 40, Argentina and Spain

Argentina's Foreign Ministry says Pereyra, an Argentine-Spanish dual citizen who resided in Barcelona for the last 10 years, is among those who died.

It says in a statement that her death was confirmed through family members living in Bolivia after a cousin identified her body at a morgue in Barcelona.

The Argentine government expressed its deep regret over the pain caused to Pereyra's family and friends and said its diplomatic missions in Barcelona and Madrid are working to assist.

People pay their respects at a memorial tribute of flowers, messages and candles to the victims. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Luca Russo, 25, Italy

One of Italy's three victims in the Barcelona van attack is being mourned as a brilliant young engineer dragged to his death before his girlfriend's eyes.

A determined Luca Russo, 25, already had a job in electronic engineering, no easy feat in Italy, where youth unemployment runs stubbornly high.

"We were investing in him, we wanted to make him grow professionally," the Italian news agency ANSA quoted Stefano Facchinello, one of the partners in the Padua area company where Russo had worked for a year, as saying.

The girlfriend, Marta Scomazzon, who was hospitalized with a fractured foot and elbow, told an aunt that "we were walking together, then the van came on top of us."

Ana Maria Suarez, Spain

The Spanish Royal family sent condolences to Suarez's family in its Twitter account after Ana Maria died in the attack in the resort town of Cambrils.

According to local media, the woman was originally from the city of Zaragoza, and was on vacation with her family. Her husband and one of her sisters are injured in a hospital.

She is the only civilian to have been killed in Cambrils, where attackers wearing fake explosives belts were shot to death by police.

Jared Tucker, 42, USA

California resident Jared Tucker, 42, and his wife were ending their European vacation in Barcelona after visiting Paris and Venice, and were on their way to a beach when they decided to stop at a cafe on La Rambla.

Shortly after her husband left to use the restroom "all mayhem broke out," Heidi Nunes-Tucker told NBC News. She said she could not find her husband at first, and the friend they were staying with helped her search.

Later, they learned that he was among those killed in the truck attack in Barcelona, the only known American fatality.

Nunes-Tucker, 40, called her husband "truly the love of my life," and says she's struggling to make sense of the violence.

"It's hard not to be angry," she said. "It's confusing why anybody would want to hurt anybody like that."

Tucker's father, Daniel Tucker, said the couple had saved for the vacation to celebrate their one-year wedding anniversary, and had sent joyful pictures, the last of which arrived a day before the tragedy.

Dan Tucker, father of Jared Tucker. (AP Photo/Jocelyn Gecker)

Jared Tucker, who worked with his father in a family business remodeling swimming pools, had "a magnetic personality and people loved him," his father said. He liked to fish, play golf and other sports and he was deeply in love with his wife, a schoolteacher.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson expressed condolences to the victim's family.

Jared Tucker leaves behind three daughters, his sister said in a message on a fundraising website.

Elke Vanbockrijck, Belgium

The local soccer club in her hometown of Tongeren held a moment of silence Friday night for Vanbockrijck, as members honored a woman who clearly left her mark on the team.

She was at the KFC Heur Tongeren soccer club "nearly every day" ferrying her 10- and 14-year-old boys back and forth to training and matches, said team president Arnould Partoens.

The family was on vacation in Barcelona. The boys and their father, a policeman, were unhurt, he said.

Belgium of Elke Vanbockrijck who was a victim in Thursday's deadly van attack in Barcelona, Spain. (TCity of Tongeren via AP)

Team vice president Herwig Dessers said coaches and players would stand in silence to remember her over the next few days "and talk to the children about what happened."

A picture of Vanbockrijck now rests on the bar inside the clubhouse.

Boy, 7, Australia and Philippines

Uncertainty surrounded the case of a 7-year-old boy whose mother was badly wounded in the Barcelona attack.

The Australian and Philippines governments said the boy was missing and his British father had gone to search for him. Catalan police, however, said all victims were accounted for and no one was missing. Spanish media reported the boy was in a Barcelona hospital.

He and his mother were in Barcelona to attend the wedding of a cousin from the Philippines, according to Philippines undersecretary Sarah Arriola.

The mother, a 43-year-old Filipino woman, was hospitalized. She had been based in Australia for the past three or four years, Arriolo said.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has asked people to pray for the boy, who has Australian citizenship.

"All of us as parents know the anguish his father is going through, and his whole family is going through, as they rush to seek to find him in Barcelona," Turnbull said.

The family's names were not officially released.

Barry Hatton and Helena Alves in Lisbon, Portugal; Ciarian Giles in Madrid, Jocelyn Gecker in Walnut Creek, California; Lorne Cook in Brussels, Nicole Winfield in Rome, and Kristen Gelineau in Sydney contributed.

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Jimmy Carter was the first U.S. president to make a state visit to sub-Saharan Africa. He once called helping with Zimbabwe’s transition from white rule to independence “our greatest single success.” And when he died at 100, his foundation’s work in rural Africa had nearly fulfilled his quest to eliminate a disease that afflicted millions, for the first time since the eradication of smallpox.

The African continent, a booming region with a population rivaling China’s that is set to double by 2050, is where Carter's legacy remains most evident. Until his presidency, U.S. leaders had shown little interest in Africa, even as independence movements swept the region in the 1960s and '70s.

“I think the day of the so-called ugly American is over,” Carter said during his warm 1978 reception in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country. He said the official state visit swept aside “past aloofness by the United States,” and he joked that he and Nigerian President Olesegun Obasanjo would go into peanut farming together.

Cold War tensions drew Carter's attention to the continent as the U.S. and Soviet Union competed for influence. But Carter also drew on the missionary traditions of his Baptist faith and the racial injustice he witnessed in his homeland in the U.S. South.

“For too long our country ignored Africa,” Carter told the Democratic National Committee in his first year as president.

African leaders soon received invitations to the White House, intrigued by the abrupt interest from the world’s most powerful nation and what it could mean for them.

“There is an air of freshness which is invigorating," visiting Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda said.

Carter observed after his first Africa trip, “There is a common theme that runs through the advice to me of leaders of African nations: ‘We want to manage our own affairs. We want to be friends with both of the great superpowers and also with the nations of Europe. We don’t want to choose up sides.’”

The theme echoes today as China also jostles with Russia and the U.S. for influence, and access to Africa's raw materials. But neither superpower has had an emissary like Carter, who made human rights central to U.S. foreign policy and made 43 more trips to the continent after his presidency, promoting Carter Center projects that sought to empower Africans to determine their own futures.

As president, Carter focused on civil and political rights. He later broadened his efforts to include social and economic rights as the key to public health.

“They are the rights of the human by virtue of their humanity. And Carter is the single person in the world that has done the most for advancing this idea,” said Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, a Sudanese legal scholar.

Even as a candidate, Carter mused about what he might accomplish, telling Playboy magazine, “it might be that now I should drop my campaign for president and start a crusade for black-majority rule in South Africa or Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). It might be that later on, we’ll discover there were opportunities in our lives to do wonderful things and we didn’t take advantage of them.”

Carter welcomed Zimbabwe’s independence just four years later, hosting new Prime Minister Robert Mugabe at the White House and quoting the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“Carter told me that he spent more time on Rhodesia than he did on the entire Middle East. And when you go into the archives and look at the administration, there is indeed more on southern Africa than the Middle East,” historian and author Nancy Mitchell said.

Relations with Mugabe’s government soon soured amid deadly repression and by 1986 Carter led a walkout of diplomats in the capital. In 2008, Carter was barred from Zimbabwe, a first in his travels. He called the country “a basket case, an embarrassment to the region.”

“Whatever the Zimbabwean leadership may think of him now, Zimbabweans, at least those who were around in the 1970s and ’80s, will always regard him as an icon and a tenacious promoter of democracy,” said Eldred Masunungure, a Harare-based political analyst.

Carter also criticized South Africa’s government for its treatment of Black citizens under apartheid, at a time when South Africa was “trying to ingratiate itself with influential economies around the world,” current President Cyril Ramaphosa said on X after Carter’s death.

The think tank Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter founded in 1982 played a key role in monitoring African elections and brokering cease-fires between warring forces, but fighting disease was the third pillar of The Carter Center's work.

“The first time I came here to Cape Town, I almost got in a fight with the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, because he was refusing to let AIDS be treated,” Carter told a local newspaper. “That’s the closest I’ve come to getting into a fist fight with a head of state.”

Carter often said he was determined to outlive the last guinea worm infecting the human race. Once affecting millions of people, the parasitic disease has nearly been eliminated, with just 14 cases documented in 2023 in a handful of African countries.

Carter's quest included arranging a four-month “guinea worm cease-fire” in Sudan in 1995 so that The Carter Center could reach almost 2,000 endemic villages.

“He taught us a lot about having faith,” said Makoy Samuel Yibi, who leads the guinea worm eradication program for South Sudan's health ministry and grew up with people who believed the disease was simply their fate. “Even the poor people call these people poor, you see. To have the leader of the free world pay attention and try to uplift them is a touching virtue.”

Such dedication impressed health officials in Africa over the years.

“President Carter worked for all humankind irrespective of race, religion, or status,” Ethiopia’s former health minister, Lia Tadesse, said in a statement shared with the AP. Ethiopia, the continent’s second most populous country with over 110 million people, had zero guinea worm cases in 2023.

Associated Press reporters Farai Mutsaka in Harare, Zimbabwe, and Michael Warren in Atlanta contributed.

FILE - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, right, greets Southern Sudanese men waiting to cast their vote at a polling station in Juba, Southern Sudan, Jan 9, 2011, during a weeklong referendum on independence that is expected to split Africa's largest nation in two. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)

FILE - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter helps in the contruction of a low-income housing project in Durban, South Africa, June 6, 2002. Carter was among 4,500 volunteers, organized by Habitat for Humanity, building 100 homes in the coastal city during the week. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe, File)

FILE - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, left, speaks with Ethiopian President Mengistu Haile Mariam in Addis Ababa, July 11, 1990, during the 26th summit of the Organization of African Unity. (AP Photo/Aris Saris, File)

FILE - U.S. President Jimmy Carter reviews honor guards during arrival ceremonies at the Dodan Barracks in Lagos, Nigeria, April 1, 1978. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - President Jimmy Carter meets with Zimbabwean Prime Minister Robert Mugabe in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Aug. 27, 1980. (AP Photo/Barry Thumma, File)

FILE - Former South African President Nelson Mandela, left, and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, right, hold HIV-positive babies at the Zola Clinic in Soweto, March 7, 2002. (AP Photo/Nonthemba Kwela, File)

FILE - A girl holds a portrait of U.S. President Jimmy Carter in a market in Lagos, Nigeria, March 31, 1978, the day of his arrival for a state visit, the first to Africa by an American president. (AP Photo/Dieter Endlicher, File)