Jail terms for 4 ETA members upheld over French police killing

Four Spanish members of the Basque separatist group ETA had their prison sentences for the robbery and murder of a French policeman upheld on appeal, a Paris court ruled Wednesday.

The three men and one woman had been convicted of taking part in an armed robbery in March 2010 at a car dealership, locking up its employee before taking off in several vehicles, which led to a deadly shootout with police in the Paris region.

The 52-year-old victim, Jean-Charles Nerin, is the only French policeman to have been shot dead by ETA and the last of the 829 people killed in its fight for independence for the Basque Country, which straddles northern Spain and southern France.

In 2011, after a decades-long campaign of violence, ETA, considered by Madrid and Paris as a “terrorist” group, announced that it was abandoning its armed struggle.

Absent from the courtroom was the last major military chief of ETA, Mikel Carrera Sarobe, known as “Ata”, whose DNA was found on a cartridge case at the site of the shootout. He had declined to appeal his life sentence.

The three men, in their 30s, and the 42-year-old woman who lost their appeal had been handed prison terms ranging from 14 to 25 years.