Three men jailed over fatal Eta attack on Madrid airport

Published on Saturday 22 May 2010 02:56

THREE members of the Basque separatist group Eta were yesterday convicted of the 2006 bombing that destroyed a parking garage at Madrid airport and killed two people, an attack that shattered a ceasefire.

•French policemen stand guard near the place where suspected top members of the Basque separatist group ETA have been arrested in the southwestern French city of Bayonne on May 20, 2010. AFP/Getty Images

The three men were each given 1,040 prison sentences. Spain frequently hands down lengthy sentences in terrorism cases, although the maximum term a person can serve for a terrorism conviction is 40 years.

The national court found the three men guilty of murder, attempted murder and taking part in a terrorist attack in connection with the explosion at Madrid's Barajas airport on 30 December, 2006. It destroyed a five-storey car park, killing two Ecuadorean immigrants and wounding 41 other people.

Eta claimed responsibility for the attack, which marked the end of the ceasefire the group had begun nine months earlier.

The guilty trio, Mattin Sarasola, Igor Portu and Mikel San Sebastian, were ordered to pay 1.2 million (1.04m) in compensation to the families of the dead Ecuadoreans.

Eta declared a ceasefire in March 2006, but reverted to violence in a matter of months after peace talks with the government of Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero went nowhere.

Spanish and French police have arrested dozens of suspected Eta members since the end of the ceasefire. Yesterday's verdict came a day after French and Spanish police arrested Eta's suspected leader and his deputy, in what officials termed an important blow, though not a death knell for the organisation.

Interior minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba identified the alleged leader as Mikel Kabikoitz Carrera Sarobe and said he was the instigator of major Eta bombings last summer in Spain, one of which killed two policemen on the island of Majorca. It was the sixth arrest of an Eta leader in two years.

For four decades the armed organisation has waged a bloody campaign for independence for the seven regions in northern Spain and south-west France that Basque separatists claim as their own. Eta – Euskadi Ta Azkatasuna, whose name stands for "Basque homeland and freedom" – first emerged in the 1960s as a student resistance movement bitterly opposed to general Francisco Franco's repressive military dictatorship.

Under Franco the Basque language was banned, its distinctive culture suppressed, and intellectuals were imprisoned and tortured for their political and cultural beliefs.

The Basque country saw some of the fiercest resistance to Franco. His death in 1975 changed all that, and the transition to democracy brought the region of two million people home rule. But despite the fact that Spain's Basque country today enjoys more autonomy than any other – it has its own parliament, police force, controls education and collects its own taxes – Eta and its hardline supporters have remained determined to push for full independence.

Its violent campaign has led to more than 820 deaths over 40 years, many of them members of the Guardia Civil, Spain's national police force, and politicians opposed to Eta's separatist demands.