MADRID, Spain (AP) — Anti-death penalty protesters lit candles in the streets outside American embassies in Europe and held up posters of Timothy McVeigh as President Bush crossed the Atlantic on his first major overseas trip.

"Bush, a compassionate killer!" read a sign held aloft by Spanish human rights activists outside the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, where Bush on Tuesday starts a European trip. Their crusade was energized by a Spaniard who returned a free man Sunday after three years on death row in Florida.

Sergio D'Elia, who stood among a group of people holding McVeigh pictures across from the U.S. Embassy in Rome, said, "We do not question the facts in the case against McVeigh, but we are protesting the principle of the death penalty."

While many in Europe argued that death by lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment — even for someone convicted of murdering 168 people in an act of anti-government rage, McVeigh's execution Monday was met with understanding in some other parts of the world.

"He deserved to die," said Min Sung-joo, 31, a computer programer in South Korea, where about 40 convicts are reportedly on death row.

"Did he think the American government was the children and the innocents he killed?" said Hassan Abdul-Rasoul, 50, a retired Kuwaiti civil servant.

Bush's six-day visit also takes him to a NATO meeting in Belgium, a European Union summit in Sweden and on stops in Poland and Slovenia.

His support for capital punishment is an extra strike against Bush in Europe, where wariness of his global aims is running high and he faces an uphill battle explaining his missile defense plans and his rejection of an agreement to fight global warming.

Abolition of the death penalty is a requirement for membership in the 15-member European Union and in the 43-nation Council of Europe, the continent's leading human rights organization. The council called McVeigh's execution "sad, pathetic and wrong."

Bush arrives to a Spain that is focused on the death penalty after the return of Joaquin Jose Martinez, who spent 37 months on death row for the slaying of a drug trafficker and a striptease artist near Tampa, Fla. He was acquitted last week after a retrial.

Martinez has become a celebrity in Spain — where capital punishment was abolished in the late 1970s. The 29-year-old has vowed to fight its use in the United States, saying he knows the torment faced by relatives of the condemned.

"They suffer as much as the families of the victims," he said Monday.

While the magnitude of McVeigh's crime muted the outrage in Europe, critics questioned the motives, the effectiveness and the morality of capital punishment in America. McVeigh's execution was "staged like a spectacle from the Middle Ages with modern communications media," said Christa Nickels, head of the human rights committee in Germany's parliament.

While the execution received top news coverage in Europe, it was marked as a matter-of-fact event in many Asian countries where capital punishment is accepted. On the streets, many people said McVeigh deserved to die.

"I really don't have any sympathy for the guy. That's what's due to him," said Edward Wong, 27, an ad-agency art director in Singapore, where 340 people have been executed in the past decade, most for drug offenses.

Media in China, which executes far more people that any other country — at least 1,000 last year — defended the death penalty as a way to deter crime and maintain social stability.

State-run papers said McVeigh led a "brief and evil life" and carried approving headlines such as, "The law acts on McVeigh."

An editorial in the New Zealand Herald, the country's largest paper, said the enormity of McVeigh's crime means he won't be missed. "But in taking his life, the United States has diminished itself," it said.