06/08/2007
Spanish judges sent the Basque leftist movement's most prominent politician to prison Friday on a terrorism conviction - more evidence of retaliation for the announcement this week by armed group ETA that it was calling off its cease-fire, analysts said.
Arnaldo Otegi, the 48-year-old leader of the outlawed Batasuna party, was arrested as he walked to a news conference in San Sebastian and was quickly jailed in the Basque city. The Supreme Court had rejected his appeal against a conviction and 15-month sentence handed down last year.
Batasuna called Otegi's arrest an act of "maximum gravity." It said the government of Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero had silenced the pro-independence movement's chief representative.
Otegi was found guilty by a lower court of defending terrorism - a crime in Spain - through remarks he made in 2003 at a rally in memory of an ETA leader on the 25th anniversary of his death. In a nearly identical case in March, however, prosecutors dropped the charges at the last minute and Otegi walked free.
Three ETA members were arrested Thursday in southwest France, and treatment of another prominent ETA figure has also changed since ETA called off its 15-month-old cease-fire on Tuesday.
Iñaki de Juana
Iñaki de Juana Chaos, convicted of killing 25 people in a string of ETA attacks, was sent back to jail Wednesday after recovering in a hospital from a 114-day hunger strike stemming from a new conviction over newspaper articles he wrote that were deemed to be terrorist threats.
When it moved de Juana Chaos from jail to the hospital in March, the government said it was acting for humanitarian reasons and would consider house arrest for the rest of his term once he recovered.
At the time, Zapatero was desperate to keep alive a peace process in which he had begun to negotiate with ETA, only to see the group detonate a bomb in December that killed two people in Madrid. Following the bombing, ETA insisted the truce still stood.
This week, however, after ETA announced it was breaking the cease-fire, the government said there was no way de Juana Chaos was going home.
"It is evident that circumstances have changed with respect to that moment," Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said, alluding to the militant's release from prison.
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