Spain: 3 arrested Basque suspects were armed

Three suspected members of the Basque separatist group ETA who were captured in France were wanted for violent acts within Spain and had been on the run from police for months, the interior minister said Sunday.

Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba named the suspects as Itziar Plaza, Iurgi Garitagoitia and Asier Borrero. All three were arrested Saturday in a joint French-Spanish police operation near the southwestern French city of Pau and were armed with Smith & Wesson revolvers when they were captured.

"They were one of ETA's most active groups, if not the most active one," Rubalcaba said at a news conference Sunday. "Their destiny is jail."

He said all three had managed to escape police detection for between six and 18 months partly by camping in rural areas.

Rubalcaba said Borrero had been active within ETA for four years, Plaza had belonged to the group for six years and there was evidence that Garitagoitia is linked to the murders of two Spaniards: Ignacio Uria and Isaias Carrasco.

Carrasco, 42, a former Socialist councilor, was gunned down in March 2008 in the Basque town of Arrasate as he emerged from his home with his wife and daughter two days before a Spanish general election.

Uria, 71, was part-owner of a construction company involved in projects to build high-speed railways linking the Basque region to the rest of Spain.

The guns found on the suspects were stolen from a store in the southern French town of Vauvert in October 2006, the interior ministry said.

ETA has killed more than 825 people since it launched a campaign in the late 1960s for an independent Basque homeland straddling the western Pyrenees in northern Spain and southwestern France.

The group declared what it called "a permanent cease-fire" in 2006, but reverted to violence months later after peace talks with the Spanish government went nowhere.

The government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, with the help of French counterparts, has pursued ETA vigorously in recent months with coordinated cross-border police actions and through the courts.

Political organizations linked to ETA, like the banned party Batasuna, have been starved of funding and barred from presenting candidates to regional and European elections.

The European Court of Human Rights recently confirmed a Spanish court ruling that bans Batasuna.