SPAIN: The Basque terrorist movement Eta suffered another blow to its leadership this weekend with the detention in south west France of five people, including its logistics and operations chiefs, and the discovery of an important arsenal of arms, ammunition and bomb-making equipment in two separate locations in the French Basque country. Jane Walker in Madrid reports.
In a joint operation involving French anti-terrorist police and Spanish Civil Guards, Felix Inaki Esparza Luri was detained in the early hours of Saturday in Saint Paul les Dax. Esparza Luri is alleged to be the head of the logistics wing of Eta, and the person responsible for supplying the explosives, arms, money and documentation to the terrorists to carry out their attacks. He is believed to have taken part in at least six killings and a kidnapping between 1983 and 1987.
Hours later police raided an apartment near Angouleme where they arrested Felix Lopez de la Calle, alias Mobutu, and his partner Mercedes Chivite, alias Mertxe. Lopez de la Calle is considered by anti-terrorist police to be Eta's second in command who co-ordinated the different sectors. He was the link between the military, the political and international wings and was responsible for their financing and for making the substitutions when a terrorist was arrested or killed.
He is accused of taking part in six assassinations between 1978 and 1980, while Mercedes Chivite has a police record of three murders when she formed part of the Madrid Commando cell in 1980. All three were armed when police moved in, and found a large quantity of money, computer equipment, valuable information on Eta activities, forged identity papers and vehicle licence plates.
The operation continued over the weekend and resulted in the discovery yesterday of a second important arsenal of weapons, explosives and bomb-making equipment in a cottage near Saint Jean Pied de Port. Two people, who have not been named, were detained in this raid.
Eta has suffered a series of blows over recent months - 200 arrests were made in France and Spain last year - and seizures of large quantities of arms and explosives have seriously weakened their operational capacity.
The acting Spanish interior minister, Mr Angel Acebes, described this weekend's operation as "extremely important" and said that the arsenals were the largest Eta possessed and were found after police had raided an apartment near Lourdes, which the terrorists appeared to have abandoned hurriedly hours earlier. They discovered two bags, each containing a bomb of around three kilos of explosives, two limpet mines which the terrorists place under vehicles as car bombs and six books prepared as parcel bombs. The police are investigating the exact composition of the explosives and the detonators.
"The fact that the bombs were fully prepared shows that Eta intended to use them in the near future. This operation is one of the harshest blows suffered by the terrorists in recent years," said Mr Acebes.