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3 ETA suspects arrested in France

By CNN Madrid Bureau Chief Al Goodman

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MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- Police arrested three suspected members of the Basque separatist group ETA in southern France on Tuesday, acting on a Spanish judge's arrest warrant, Spain's Interior Ministry said in a statement.

The arrests came just before the start of a debate in Spanish parliament on ETA, in which the ruling Socialists and the opposition conservatives sparred over alleged leniency in the treatment of a key ETA prisoner who is under house arrest.

The three men arrested are suspected of being part of an ETA cell that killed three people in various attacks between 1994 and 1997.

Police finally dismantled the cell but some members fled, and the latest suspects arrested were thought to be among the fugitives, the Interior Ministry statement said.

One of the three men arrested, Ignacio Telletxea Goni, 33, was released from jail in France in 2005 after serving five years there for terrorist activities and with a court order not to reside in France, CNN partner station CNN+ reported.

The other two suspects, Francisco Javier Irastorza Dorronsoro and Marcos Sagarzazu Oyarzabal, had been arrested in Hendaye, France, in 2002 but later released, CNN+ reported.

ETA is blamed for more than 800 deaths in its nearly four-decade campaign for Basque independence. The United States and the European Union list ETA as a terrorist group.

ETA declared a "permanent" cease-fire in March 2006, raising hopes for an end to the violence, but an ETA car bomb at Madrid's airport Dec. 30 shattered the fledging peace process, and killed two men who were sleeping in their cars in the airport garage when the bomb exploded.

Since then, about seven ETA suspects have been arrested, including those on Tuesday.

About 500 ETA operatives -- including convicts or suspects awaiting trial -- are in Spanish jails and an estimated 100 more are in French jails, authorities have recently told CNN.

In Parliament on Tuesday, Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba defended the government's recent decision to grant house arrest to convicted ETA killer Jose Ignacio de Juana Chaos, who had been on a hunger strike and -- according to the government -- close to death.

De Juana Chaos, starting in the mid-1980s, had already served his sentence for the 25 murders. But he started the hunger strike after a court sentenced him last year to 12 years in prison, in a separate case, for making terrorist threats in newspaper articles.

Spain's Supreme Court last month reduced that sentence to just three years. The government then permitted his transfer to a hospital in the Basque region in northern Spain, under police guard.

He has since ended the hunger strike but remains in hospital and under guard for the remainder of his sentence, which may later include house arrest under police guard if his health improves sufficiently to merit release from hospital.

In parliament, Rubalcaba said that de Juana Chaos "is neither free nor dead" and he "continues to serve his sentence."

Rubalcaba accused the opposition conservative Popular Party of lying in its assertions that the prisoner had been freed, and he reminded the conservatives that when they were power from 1996 to 2004, they granted dozens of ETA prisoner transfers and other measures similar to what the Socialists had just done with de Juana Chaos.

But a conservative leader, Eduardo Zaplana, countered Rubalcaba, saying, "In spite of your effort to hide the truth, a majority of Spaniards are opposed to sending De Juana Chaos to his home."

Hundreds of thousands of conservatives demonstrated in Madrid last Saturday -- in a rally convened by the Popular Party -- against the government's policy on ETA. The party's leader, Mariano Rajoy, has said he will take part in a similar rally next Saturday in the northern city of Pamplona.

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