21 May 2008

BORDEAUX - French and Spanish police have seized the suspected leader of the Basque separatist group ETA in a joint raid hailed by both countries Wednesday as a major blow against terrorism.

Javier Lopez Pena, 49, was detained along with three other suspected ETA members in a sweep on an apartment in the French city of Bordeaux just before midnight Tuesday, officials said.

Hailing the arrests as a breakthrough, Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said Pena was "in all probability, the person with the most political and military weight" in ETA.

Known as "Thierry," Pena had been on the run since 1983 and is believed to have taken over the leadership of the separatists in 2006, after previous leader Mikel Albizu was arrested in France in October 2004.

The Spanish interior ministry considers him to be one of the masterminds of a December 2006 car bomb attack at Madrid airport that killed two people and ended an ETA ceasefire.

Taken into French custody overnight, the three men and one woman were brought back Wednesday to the Bordeaux apartment, where police were searching for evidence to formally establish their identities.

Three of them kept their faces hidden from the press and shouted slogans in Basque - "Long live ETA", "Love live the free Basque country" - as they were led into the building.

The fourth, his face unmasked, told reporters in heavily accented French:

"I denounce the situation in the Basque country."

So far police have discovered four handguns in the flat and two stolen cars parked nearby, officials said.

A witness to the raid, Nicolas Teuchert, told AFP he saw about 20 cars pull up outside the apartment block and police in masks, some carrying machine guns, entered the building in the centre of the city.

Police followed Pena's girlfriend Yolanda Molina, a lawyer for ETA suspects held in France, to the apartment, according to Spanish newspaper Publico.

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