Spanish police arrested three suspected ETA suspects in Guipúzcoa June 23. The Interior Ministry said the three formed an "armed commando" which was prepared to go into action immediately, but denied it was responsible for a June 19 car bomb attack near Bilbao that killed a National Police counter-terrorism inspector. The attack, if it was the work of ETA, ends a six-month lull in activity by the group, four of whose leaders have been arrested in the past year by French and Spanish police. Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who broke off meetings in Brussels and returned to Madrid following the attack, said, "My will and my determination to finish ETA is unbreakable." (Typically Spanish [2], June 23; NYT [3], June 19)
See our last posts on Spain [4] and the Basque struggle [5].
