ETA claims responsibility for killing three Spanish police

Madrid – The Basque separatist organisation ETA claimed Sunday in a statement responsibility for several attacks, including those that killed two Civil Guard officers and a police inspector it called a "torturer".

In the statement released to the pro-independence Basque daily Gara, a regular channel for ETA communications, the group claimed the June 19 car bomb attack that killed 49-year-old police inspector Eduardo Puelles Garcia in the Basque town of Arrigorriaga.

The statement also claimed the 30 July car bomb attack outside a police barracks on the Mediterranean island of Majorca that killed two members of the Civil Guards paramilitary police, Diego Salva and Carlos Saenz de Tejada.

It said Puelles was "the chief of police operations against numerous leftist independence activists and against pro-independence youths for the past decade, and the coordinator of different operations against ETA."

"Sometimes, as the most experienced and despicable torturer in the commissariat … he also pressured independence activists into collaborating by threats," said the group.

Founded half a century ago, ETA is blamed for the deaths of 828 people in its violent campaign for an independent Basque homeland encompassing parts of northern Spain and southwest France.

The group also claimed in the statement a car bomb attack on a Civil Guards barracks in the northern city of Burgos on 29 July that injured 40 people, and a bomb attack on the offices of the ruling Socialist Party in the Basque town of Durango on 10 July in which no one was injured.

Despite claiming the attacks ETA said it "does not seek to impose any project, unlike successive Spanish leaders. It is ETA which has over the long decades sought dialogue and political solution."

Considered a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States, the group resumed its campaign of violence in mid-2007 after a 15-month ceasefire for ultimately unsuccessful talks the with Socialist government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

AFP /Expatica