ETA suspects held before soldier's funeral

MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- French police have arrested two suspected ETA members, and an international alert has been put out for an ETA militant recently released from jail.

The arrests were made hours before the funeral of a Spanish soldier killed in a car bomb blamed on the Basque separatist group.

The Spanish National Court judge on Tuesday asked Interpol to find a notorious former ETA prisoner, Jose Ignacio de Juana Chaos, in Ireland or elsewhere, according to a copy of the court order, viewed by CNN.

De Juana Chaos gave authorities a Dublin address following his release from Spanish prison last month after serving 21 years for the murders of 25 people in a series of ETA attacks.

A local court in Spain's Basque region is now investigating whether he committed a fresh crime, allegedly for praising terrorism, after his prison release. He failed to testify in the court, in San Sebastian, last Friday, Spanish media reported.

Spanish authorities suspect that the three car bombs that have exploded in Spain since early Sunday -- killing the soldier and wounding more than 10 people -- were prepared in stolen cars in France, ETA's traditional rearguard, and then driven across the border to Spain.

Police identified the two ETA suspects arrested in France as Maria Lizagarra Merino, 24, a fugitive since June; and Unai Fano, a Spanish Interior Ministry spokesman told CNN.

In addition to the stolen cars, they had forged documents, two guns, ammunition and cash, the Interior Ministry statement said.

The arrests came after a tipoff from a citizen about two suspicious people in the French forest, the statement said.

ETA is blamed for more than 800 killings in its four-decade fight for Basque independence, and is listed as a terrorist group by the European Union and the United States.

The latest fatality was Spanish army non-commissioned officer Luis Conde de la Cruz, in his mid-40s. He died early Monday in the northern town of Santona, while evacuating a military academy after a warning call -- in the name of ETA -- about a car bomb there.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero attended the funeral for the soldier on Tuesday in Segovia, near Madrid.

Spanish political leaders -- who have often been at odds over the best way to fight ETA -- closed ranks after the latest car bombings. The leaders vowed, in a statement released in parliament on Monday, "to fight with courage and democratic strength against the terrorist group ETA until it is finally beaten."

The pre-dawn car bomb on Monday that killed the soldier was preceded on Sunday by two other pre-dawn bombs -- one near a police station in the Basque coastal town of Ondarroa, where three Basque police officers and four civilians were injured when the car bomb exploded without a warning call.

The other attack was in the Basque political capital of Vitoria. A warning call in the name of ETA preceded the car bomb explosion at a local bank. Police cleared the area and no one was injured, authorities said.

Last week, Spanish court decisions sought to further clamp down on ETA supporters. The Supreme Court outlawed two leftist Basque political parties for their secretive links to ETA. The parties have hundreds of elected town council-members and regional parliament deputies, who are expected to lose their seats.

In a separate case, the National Court, which handles cases of terrorism, convicted 21 people in a ruling that said their work on behalf of ETA prisoners actually belied secretive links to the armed separatists themselves.

The court convicted the 21 of membership in a terrorist group, and sentenced most of them to eight years in prison, while three got 10 year-sentences.

In March 2006, ETA declared a "permanent" unilateral cease-fire, raising hopes for an end to nearly 40 years of ETA violence. But an ETA bomb at Madrid's airport in December 2006 killed two men and caused heavy damage, and the Socialist government immediately ended the fledgling peace process.

Yet ETA did not officially end its cease-fire until June 2007.

There are about 500 ETA convicts or suspects in Spanish jails and more than 100 in French jails, authorities said.

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